Yes, the same with me. I also arrive to a conclusion that only if the earth is flat then it’s logical that “and it was evening and it was dawn, day one” means a progression of time where Earth’s Day-1 started in the evening.
Thank you Mervin.
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The curse was undone - (read the end of Genesis 8).
And yet we have this from Paul (Colossians 1:25): “I became its servant according to God’s commission, given to me for you, in order to declare His message in full – the mystery that was hidden for ages and generations, but now has been revealed to his saints.”
[my own emphasis added above.]
So we are expected - even held responsible - to know more now than the ancients did, given our privileged hindsight into matters that they could only dimly glimpse or guess at (or have partially revealed to them) of their future. I know - other passages can be found where Paul complains of things morally going from bad to worse, and I in my own turn now can join in with that sentiment too as we mournfully (or happily) catalogue all the new and growing faults of “kids these days” (and our generation didn’t lack for the same complaints leveled against us back in our day too.) But it’s a narrative we choose to cling to that crops the middle of the bible out, shaving away the first couple chapters of Genesis and the final couple chapters of Revelation. We turn the scriptural narrative into one that begins with “the fall” and ends with horrible judgment. But when one looks at the entirety of scriptures - that begin with the goodness of creation (an observation that is never contradicted), and ends with glorious redemption and freedom - it changes the entire narrative of the story. And one doesn’t need to look far or deep to see lots of holes in the “things are only and ever getting worse” narratives that some wish to spin in order to stoke fear and support among their financial base. It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of things to be concerned about and that call for our prayerful and active response. I think we all agree on that, even if we disagree over exactly which things are most concerning. But the overall narrative of scriptures is not one that supports some uniform “descent of man”, despite such descents as we may personally undergo when we run away from God. But that has been a problem for every generation - not just ours - and Christ has been there to receive us and call us back (every generation) - and in these last millenia even more explicitly so as we got to see him do it in the flesh, revealing that God’s kingdom is already here among us now.
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Hi Mervin,
thank you for your thoughts and beliefs.
I certainly do not believe that Genesis 8 is telling us that the curse that resulted from the disobedience of Adam and Eve to God’s Holy command was lifted.
I have never heard that before; it is completely left field and makes no sense whatever.
Do Theistic evolutionists believe that the curse of God on creation was lifted; and do they use the text of Genesis 8:20-22 to justify that belief?
When I read that very same text, in Genesis 8 in context:
Romans 8: 20-22
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
it is absolutely clear that God said in His heart that He "*will never again, curse the ground because of man" and will never, “again strike down every living creature as I have done” but that in no way says anything about the curse being lifted.
The ground still does not readily yield its strength to man, woman still have terrible pain in childbirth and Paul tells ever so clearly:
For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.
Romans 8:22
Thus the curse is still in effect and always has been in effect since that fateful day in the Garden of Eden around about 6,000 years ago. What I mean by the downhill slide of humanity, is that there has been since Adam very likely a reduction in intelligence, reasoning power and problem solving skills that would have coincided with the other dire effects such as declining lifespans that commenced at nearly a thousand years in the days of Adam, yet now only amount to around one hundred years that constitutes a ten fold reduction in lifespan, it seems likely to me that other important aspects would have deteriorated in a similar fashion.
Where I said,
“thus the downhill slide of humanity is to be expected in my humble opinion.”
when you read it in context:
I’ve observed in many of my colleagues over the past 40 to 50 years a steady decline of mental capability. Hard to quantify for sure, but nevertheless that is my experience.
Friends of mine who are teachers and lecturers have noted the same thing, and have stated on many occasions that average attention spans of their students is dwindling, now down to only a few minutes.
As I have said before, I certainly do not pretend to have all the answers, but it stands to reason the further away in time we get from the First Adam being created by God from the dust of the ground, the more corrupted in every respect we become. The curse has not only brought forth pain in childbirth, thistles and thorns, carnivory and death, it is also recorded that the whole of creation travails and groans under the deleterious effects of the curse on creation, thus the downhill slide of humanity is to be expected in my humble opinion.
I would have hoped that my meaning was clear and obvious, but I will explain in a bit more detail.
The effects of the curse commenced on that fateful day in the Garden of Eden and have continued to this day. The curse has NOT been lifted, its effects are ever present.
God Bless,
jon
Well, when did you become uniformitarian? How do you know? Were you there?
Nobody has stared at organic matter for hundreds of millions of years.
Rates of radioactive decay, mineral formation, speciation, stalactites, tectonic processes, varves, and tree rings are also based on empirical research. Everything in science that YEC is at war with is backed up with empirical research. YEC just sweeps all that aside until can misrepresent some rate to prop up their rhetorical needs - shrinking sun, dust on the moon, salt in the ocean, then all of a sudden those bandied rates are sacrosanct.
I suppose that when your message is delusional, consistency is not in the budget.
Yes, soft tissue does not last unaltered for millions of years. Yes, there are chemical decay products and structures that do. Not every creature on the planet dies and decays in the same way. The first thing to decay upon death is generally the brain - gone within weeks or months. We know this from lots of gruesome empirical and forensic observation. So we should not find human skeletons which are 12,000 years old with no soft tissue, except the brains are intact - yet we have over a thousand such specimens from various burial situations. There are chemical pathways which can stabilize end products of remains.
There were no dinosaurs that descended the gangplank of any ark. We know this because if there were, we would have soft tissue all right…carcasses, brains, and actual living breathing dinosaurs. We do not because there never were any dinosaurs living with people, not in history, not in the Bible, not in the epochs of time.
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Speaking about dinosaur…
I’m interested to know whether scientists from Young Earth Creationism (YEC) have found dinosaur remains (such as a T-rex), which, after they were dated, showed an age of 6000 years old.
I mean, if so, then it could be used as proof that dinosaurs existed 6000 years ago.
I’ve searched the internet about it, but have not found yet.
Thanks.
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Thanks for acknowledging that physical chemistry and physics have rules. Now let’s discuss what the ordinary basic rules of physical chemistry and physics actually are.
First of all, before you make any claims about what the evidence does or does not refute, you need to make sure you’re getting your facts straight about what the evidence in question actually consists of.
Second: if you’re going to claim that something can’t last X amount of time, you need to back up that assertion with meaningful, accurate and honest measurements. Not with hand-waving about scientists being “surprised.” Surprise is not a substitute for measurement.
Your claim that people found haemoglobin and DNA fragments of multiple base pairs still connected are untrue for starters. All that has been found in that respect was haemoglobin breakdown products and DNA breakdown products. If DNA fragments had been found, they would have been sequenced. This is a common trope in every young earthist claim that I see over and over again: they tell us that scientists have found unstable biomolecules, but then when you go back to the original sources, all you find being discovered is the ultimately stable breakdown products of those unstable molecules. As for what has actually been found, where are the measurements that substantiate your claims that they couldn’t have lasted for 65 million years?
Look, I addressed this on the other thread (the one in which you ignored me completely). I said this:
Well I’m sorry if you found my analogies “mocking,” Jon, but I do need to express somehow just how far short your claims about science fall below the standards that I would expect from someone who has the level of professional scientific experience that you have said that you have on more than one occasion. Auntie Flossie who hasn’t set foot in a laboratory since finishing compulsory science education at the first possible opportunity at age sixteen would be entitled to a kind and gracious response when she makes clueless and easily falsified arguments because she can be excused on the grounds of ignorance. You do not have the luxury of that excuse.
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Not surprising given finding proof dinosaurs existed 6,000 years ago would be worthy of a Nobel Prize and elevate the finder to superstar status. What is interesting is I have never seen a YEC actually try to find some proof. Perhaps they actually know such proof doesn’t exist.
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Unless any of us are used to living as seminomadic herders or subsistence farmers.
Is it possible that perhaps they don’t know how to date the remains ? (because they feel no need to bother to learn on how to date remains, at most the age will certainly 6000 yo).
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First they would have to find the remains, which would be a major scientific discovery in itself. Second, they have plenty of PhD’s that would know how to date said remains.
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Hi Ron,
thank you for your post.
I certainly do not subscribe to the uniformitarian mythology that was clearly debunked when Mount St.Helens erupted in Washington State in May 1980.
You are of course correct, “Nobody has stared at organic matter for hundreds of millions of years.” because the hundreds of millions of years never happened, that belief is nothing more than uniformitarian dogma and mythology.
i encourage you to read the article at: Dino DNA bone cells
Rather than make unsubstantiated claims, I encourage you to check the references for yourself if you don’t believe.
I expect you would already be familiar with the information below regarding the Mary Schweitzer finds, they are quite remarkable and have been checked and rechecked by many researchers now, so I would expect are reliable!
"The presence of original molecular components is not predicted for fossils older than a million years, and the discovery of collagen in this well-preserved dinosaur supports the use of actualistic conditions to formulate molecular degradation rates and models, rather than relying on theoretical or experimental extrapolations derived from conditions that do not occur in nature."
The above quote in ‘Science’ is by:
Schweitzer, M.H., et al., Analyses of soft tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex suggest the presence of protein, Science 316(5822):277–280, 2007
As a careful scientist, after Dr Schweitzer found elastic blood vessels and other soft tissue, she rechecked her data thoroughly. The report quoted her as follows:
“It was totally shocking,” Schweitzer says. “I didn’t believe it until we’d done it 17 times."
Schweitzer, cited in Science 307:1852, 25 Mar 2005.
*Some evolutionists saw the baneful implications to their long-age dogma, and claimed that the blood vessels were really bacterial biofilms, and the blood cells were iron-rich spheres called framboids.
Kaye, T.G. et al., Dinosaurian soft tissues interpreted as bacterial biofilms, PLoS ONE 3(7):e2808, 2008 | doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002808.
Yet this ignores the wide range of evidence Schweitzer adduced, and she has answered this claim in detail. Researchers debate: Is it preserved dinosaur tissue, or bacterial slime? blogs.discovermagazine.com, 30 Jul 2008.
Schweitzer’s more recent research makes long ages even harder to believe. Here, she analyzed bone from two dinosaurs, the famous Tyrannosaurus rex (MOR 11251) and a large duck-billed dinosaur called Brachylophosaurus canadensis (MOR 2598)
Schweitzer, M.H. et al. Molecular analyses of dinosaur osteocytes support the presence of endogenous molecules, Bone, 17 Oct 2012 | doi:10.1016/j.bone.2012.10.010.
Bone is an amazing structure with the ability to re-work in response to stress, and uses the finely designed protein osteocalcin, which has been found in the best known duck-billed dinosaur, Iguanadon, ‘dated’ to 120 Ma
Embery G., Milner A.C., Waddington R.J., Hall R.C., Langley M.S., Milan A.M., Identification of proteinaceous material in the bone of the dinosaur Iguanodon, Connect Tissue Res. 44 Suppl 1:41–6, 2003. The abstract says: “an early eluting fraction was immunoreactive with an antibody against osteocalcin.”
The problem for long-agers is even more acute with their discovery of DNA. Estimates of DNA stability put its upper limit of survival at 125,000 years at 0°C, 17,500 years at 10°C and 2,500 years at 20°C.2 One recent report said:
"There is a general belief that DNA is ‘rock solid’—extremely stable,” says Brandt Eichman, associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, who directed the project. “Actually DNA is highly reactive.”
“On a good day about one million bases in the DNA in a human cell are damaged. These lesions are caused by a combination of normal chemical activity within the cell and exposure to radiation and toxins coming from environmental sources including cigarette smoke, grilled foods and industrial wastes”
Newly discovered DNA repair mechanism, Science News, sciencedaily.com, 5 Oct 2010; see also Sarfati, J., New DNA repair enzyme discovered, DNA repair enzyme,
A recent paper on DNA shows that DNA might be able to last as much as 400 times longer in bone.
Allentoft, M.E. et al., The half-life of DNA in bone: measuring decay kinetics in 158 dated fossils, Proc. Royal Society B 279(1748):4724–4733, 7 Dec 2012 | doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.1745.
Yet Schweitzer’s team detected DNA in three independent ways. Indeed, one of these chemical tests and specific antibodies specifically detect DNA in its double–stranded form. This shows that it was quite well preserved, since short strands of DNA less than about 10 bp don’t form stable duplexes. The fluorescent molecular probe DAPI lodges in the minor groove of a stable double helix, which requires even more bp, and the stain Propidium iodide (C27H34I2N4), a fluorescent stain. is also an intercalation test.
4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole, a fluorescent stain. DAPI can bind to a 12-bp piece of DNA, as long as there are 4 A-T pairs, according to Larsen, T.A. et al., The structure of DAPI bound to DNA, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics 7(3):477–491, 1989 | doi:10.1080/07391102.1989.10508505.
Again, the first possible response by long-agers is “contamination”. But the DNA was not found everywhere, but only in certain internal regions of the ‘cells’. This pattern was just like in ostrich cells, but nothing like biofilm taken from other sources and exposed to the same DNA-detecting pattern. This is enough to rule out bacteria, because in more complex cells (such as ours and dinos), the DNA is stored in a small part of the cell—the nucleus.
Schweitzer’s team detected a special protein called histone H4. Not only is yet another protein a big problem for millions of years, but this is a specific protein for DNA. (DNA is Deoxy-riboNucleic Acid, so is negatively charged, while histones are alkaline so positively charged, so they attract DNA). In more complex organisms, the histones are tiny spools around which the DNA is wrapped
Segal, E. et al., A genomic code for nucleosome positioning, Nature 442(7104):772–778, 17 Aug 2006; DOI: 10.1038/nature04979. – AND – Schweitzer, M.H., Montana State University Museum of the Rockies; cited on p. 160 of Morell, V., Dino DNA: The hunt and the hype, Science 261(5118):160–162, 9 Jul 1993.
And so following on from the above cited reference, But histones are not found in bacteria. So, as Schweitzer et al. say, “These data support the presence of non-microbial DNA in these dinosaur cells.”
Schweitzer, M.H. et al. Molecular analyses of dinosaur osteocytes support the presence of endogenous molecules, Bone, 17 Oct 2012 | doi:10.1016/j.bone.2012.10.010. See also Thomas, B., Did scientists find T. Rex DNA? Did Scientists Find T. Rex DNA? | The Institute for Creation Research, 7 Nov 2012.
A paper published in early 2020, Schweitzer was a co-author, the claims are more explicit as to the presence of intact dinosaur DNA
Bailleul, A.M., Zheng, W., Horner, J.R., Hall, B.K., Holliday, C.M., and Schweitzer, M.H., Evidence of proteins, chromosomes and chemical markers of DNA in exceptionally preserved dinosaur cartilage, National Science Review nwz206, 12 Jan 2020 | doi:10.1093/nsr/nwz206.
In an earlier paper, they claim that to interact with the probe molecules like DAPI, double-stranded piece of DNA of at least 6 base pairs required, based on a 1995 paper, although an earlier paper suggested that DAPI can bind to a minimum 12-bp piece of DNA, as long as there are 4 A-T pairs, since DAPI intercalates into “the minor groove of A-T rich sequences of DNA.”
4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole, a fluorescent stain. DAPI can bind to a 12-bp piece of DNA, as long as there are 4 A-T pairs, according to Larsen, T.A. et al., The structure of DAPI bound to DNA, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics 7(3):477–491, 1989 | doi:10.1080/07391102.1989.10508505.
That paper says:
This study provides the first clear chemical and molecular demonstration of calcified cartilage preservation in Mesozoic skeletal material, and suggests that in addition to cartilage-specific collagen II, DNA, or at least the chemical markers of DNA (for example, chemically altered base pairs that can still react to PI and DAPI), may preserve for millions of years.
Bailleul, A.M., Zheng, W., Horner, J.R., Hall, B.K., Holliday, C.M., and Schweitzer, M.H., Evidence of proteins, chromosomes and chemical markers of DNA in exceptionally preserved dinosaur cartilage, National Science Review nwz206, 12 Jan 2020 | doi:10.1093/nsr/nwz206.
Mary Schweitzer’s said:
"It was exactly like looking at a slice of modern bone. But of course, I couldn’t believe it. I said to the lab technician: “The bones are, after all, 65 million years old. How could blood cells survive that long?”
Schweitzer, M.H., Montana State University Museum of the Rockies; cited on p. 160 of Morell, V., Dino DNA: The hunt and the hype, Science 261(5118):160–162, 9 Jul 1993.
But this just shows the grip of the long-age paradigm. A more reasonable and indeed scientific question would be:
This looks like modern bone; I have seen blood cells [and blood vessels] and detected hemoglobin [and now actin, tubulin, collagen, histones, and DNA], and real chemistry shows they can’t survive for 65 million years. What I don’t see is the claimed millions of years. So we should abandon this doctrine. The above references adapted from an article by Jonathan D Sarfati.
I wish you well and we will have to agree to disagree on this.
God Bless,
jon
You do realize that your above statements contradict?
You can safely assume that I am familiar with Schweitzer’s work and the YEC spin on it. Mary Schweitzer has published on pathways for soft tissue breakdown products to be preserved over millions of years.
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It is now 31 years later, and we really are not much further along. A few molecules and microscopic structures detected here and there. Quite unlike mammoths found frozen that are largely intact. Good interview with Dr. Schweitzer first hand: Not So Dry Bones: An interview with Mary Schweitzer - BioLogos
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Hi Ron,
thank you for your post.
In answer: Not at all!
There is absolutely no contradiction whatsoever.
I can only assume that it is your dogmatic attachment to uniformitarian philosophy and belief in evolution and its corollary of ‘billions of years of deep time’ that has lead you to this invalid conclusion.
Do those millions of years match the alleged age of Dinosaur samples tested from 65+ million years?
God Bless,
jon
Thanks Phil, I’ll check it out.
God Bless,
jon
From Wikipedia
Uniformitarianism… is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.
When you claim “real chemistry shows they can’t survive for 65 million years”, you are asserting that a present measurement can be extrapolated to the past.
You claim not to subscribe to uniformitarianism, but assert a uniformitarian claim.
The issue is that you cannot just sweep aside evidence for an ancient earth by labeling it as uniformitarian. Processes where the rates are well understood, such are radioactive decay, are based on solid, observational science.
Soft tissue was a surprising find, but the amounts involved are minuscule and altered, and they are not evidence of recent burial. The absence of far more intact preservation negates any possibility that dinosaurs were alive at any recent time.
Philip J. Senter - Soft tissues in fossil bone
this review corrects misconceptions and links studies of archaeological bone to studies of fossil bone, to elucidate the mechanisms by which cells and soft tissues are preserved in bones for hundreds, then thousands, then millions of years.
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For starters reading it as ancient literature tells us exactly what “the image of God” means.
Perhaps the densest amount of items comes from recognizing that the Genesis writer took the Egyptian creation story as his starting point; that makes Genesis 1 into a whole series of slams against not just individual Egyptian gods but their entire cosmology.
Then there’s the fact that as a 'royal chronicle" the opening Creation account does in fact depict a conflict between Yahweh and chaos – which also serves as polemic against the Egyptians.
And the temple inauguration aspect gives guidance for understanding the second Creation story, plus making sense of the “days” motif; additionally it makes better sense of the progression of the content of the various days (including the difference between “Let light be!” and setting up light sources).
Essentially, reading the first Creation story as the ancient literature it is provides theology upon theology and more theology. Reading it the YEC way is like playing with toy farm animals.
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Why do you insist that the Bible teaches science?
And unless the world is understood as flat, then a literal reading of Genesis 1 makes no sense.
In one course we tackled ancient Egyptian texts. I remember when we hit a pair of tablets of complaints that sounded like they could have been editorials in our newspaper: a lament for how the younger generation was turning out so badly, and a complaint that civilization was being dragged down by the multitude of lawyers.
Yeah, going that route ends up in the same situation as Roman Catholics in the Middle Ages who believed that being born of a woman made a person unclean from the start, so Mary had to be miraculously conceived, and her mother also, and her mother, and so on all the way back to the Garden: if humans have been degrading all along, then God must have miraculously preserved one genetic line for Jesus to be born from.
The amount of geological ignorance behind that statement is mind-boggling.
I have read a couple of dozen claims from YECists about what things at Mount St. Helens supposedly prove, and not a one would have passed basic college introductory science – none. It is both saddening and sickening to hear Christians making such foolish claims that cause the world to laugh at God.
She has also commented on what the YEC folks have said about her work – and she was politer than I would be able to be.
You mean the uniformitarian philosophy that comes from believing that Yahweh is trustworthy and dependable and does not change the rules in the middle of the game?
That’s exactly what we should conclude about Creation from reading the old covenant scriptures: Yahweh doesn’t change the rules He established and is not capricious about His doings.
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Young earthists don’t just reject uniformitarianism; they take their rejection of uniformitarianism to levels so extreme as to be deep into the realms of very soft science fiction if not outright fantasy. Accelerated nuclear decay is just one example.
There are some things that it is perfectly reasonable to assume were the same in the distant unobservable past as they are today. There are some things that it is completely unreasonable to suggest could have been different in the distant unobservable past from what they are today. For example, it is not reasonable to suggest that the Earth was originally flat and covered by a solid dome, only to assume the spherical shape that it has today during the time of Noah’s Flood. Even young earthists will admit that much.
In the same way, it is not reasonable to assume that the basic laws of mathematics and measurement could have been different in the past. Furthermore, some hypotheses of non-uniformity make testable predictions. For example, if the fundamental constants of physics (the speed of light, the fine structure constant, the strength of the electromagnetic force, the mass ratios of the elementary particles and so on) had ever been different in the past, then life as we know it would not have been possible. This is because just about everything else in nature depends on these fundamental constants, and so to change them would have all sorts of knock on effects that would be extremely far reaching.
This is why nuclear decay rates could not have been different in the past from what they are today. It is also why zircon crystals could not have been created containing lead in the quantities that we see today either. These things require changes to the most fundamental constants of nature such as these in order to happen.
The problem, of course, is that the Mount St Helens claims by young earthists violate two of the most fundamental rules of accurate and honest measurement.
- Unreliability must be quantified.
- Unreliability is specific to the context in which the measurements are taken.
The Mount St Helens study took freshly erupted samples and had them dated using an obsolete form of uranium-lead potassium-argon dating by a laboratory that specifically said on its website that it didn’t have the high precision equipment needed to date samples less than 2 million years old. This being the case, it was no surprise to anyone that the results came back ranging up to about 2.8 million years. However, young earthists repeatedly tout these examples as “evidence” that more modern techniques with better precision, on samples a hundred times older, must also be so out of whack that they could easily have been formed just yesterday for all we know.
This is like taking an old, rusty set of mechanical bathroom scales and seeing that it reads a couple of kilograms when you’re not standing on it, then when you stand on a new set of electronic bathroom scales and see a reading of 90 kilograms, concluding that you could quite plausibly weigh nothing. It simply doesn’t follow.
In a nutshell: the soft tissue findings all have perfectly reasonable and credible explanations that are fully consistent with the known laws of physics and chemistry, and hand-waving them away as “rescuing devices” won’t change that fact. Nothing has been found that doesn’t.
Young earth rescuing devices, on the other hand, require the invention of new laws of fantasy physics that, by their own admission, would have vaporised the Earth’s crust many times over if they had any basis in reality.
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