Is there a standpoint from which the creation days in Genesis 1 are described as 24 hours per day?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I’m familiar with the RATE project’s study on helium diffusion in zircons.

It is by far the most complex young earth claim that I’m aware of. When I was researching for my blog series on Answers in Genesis’s ten best evidences for a young earth, it took me two whole evenings to even start to get my head round what was going on. I’ve read the RATE project report, the critiques by Gary Loechelt and Kevin Henke, the RATE team’s responses to the responses, Loechelt and Henke’s responses to the responses to the responses, and so on. But I also had to do quite a bit of background reading as well. To be able to respond in detail requires an understanding of multiple areas of geology, mineralogy, crystallography, physics, chemistry and mathematics. There’s a lot of dense technical jargon involved, with terms such as Q/Q_0, a and b flying around, and it can easily leave your head spinning if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands and specialist knowledge. But hey, at least I now know the difference between gneiss and granodiorite, and on top of that I got reminded of something from my physics degree that I’d all but forgotten, but that I’ve since managed to put to good use in my day job.

Because it’s so complex, only a subject matter expert in diffusion chemistry is going to be able to do a complete, in-depth critique. However, for those of us with some scientific education but not necessarily an in depth expertise in the subject, there are some general principles that we can apply anyway.

First and foremost of these is what I call the FizzBuzz Principle. Specifically:

If there are egregious, deal-breaking technical errors in aspects of the claim that you are able to fact-check, you can safely assume that aspects of the claim that are beyond your competence will also be in error.

This is called the FizzBuzz Principle after an interview question that is common in the software development industry. In order to save costs, recruiters need to weed out candidates who can’t code their way out of a paper bag at a very early stage in the process. To do this, they ask a question based on a children’s game, “FizzBuzz”:

Print out the numbers from 1 to 100. But for every number divisible by three, print “Fizz”. For every number divisible by five, print “Buzz”. If a number is divisible by both three and five, print “FizzBuzz”.

Even entry-level developers should be able to answer this question with their eyes closed. But many candidates – some of whom even have PhDs in computer science – struggle with it.

Only if they manage to complete FizzBuzz does the interview then proceed to more advanced topics such as object oriented design patterns, regular expressions, database concurrency, test driven development, or machine learning. If they don’t, they are thanked for their time, the phone screen is cut short, and they are not invited for a second on-site interview.

So where is the FizzBuzz in the RATE project’s zircons study? Answer: accelerated nuclear decay.

Billion fold accelerated nuclear decay is science fiction. It didn’t happen, it’s as simple as that. It doesn’t take a “secular” or “materialist” worldview to see this, and you don’t have to have “been there to see it happen” either. The RATE team themselves admitted that the amount of nuclear decay they needed to accelerate would have raised the Earth’s temperature to 22,400°C. Four times hotter than the surface of the sun, and hot enough to vaporise the Earth’s crust many times over.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a link to the page in the RATE technical report where Dr Andrew A Snelling, PhD, Director of Research at Answers in Genesis, did the calculations:

If you wonder why young earthists have such a hard time getting taken seriously by scientifically literate people—including scientifically literate Christians—this is why. I remember the first time I came across their claims of accelerated nuclear decay. I was like, “They’re claiming WHAT?!!?” I later mentioned it to a young earthist friend who said he thought it was some sort of atheist parody to “discredit creationism.” I’m sorry, but when even your own supporters aren’t able to tell the difference between your own arguments and parodies of them, you have a problem.

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Only because you don’t know enough geology to be able to tell the difference. Anyone with a decent education in geology easily recognizes that “Flood geology” is just wishful science fiction.

The mere existence of coal is contrary to any global flood – a global flood could not have produced the thick seams of coal that we actually find. Getting coal seams requires many thousands of years of vegetation growing and dying in the same place when there were no bacteria that could digest cellulose, enough so that the mere existence of coal shows that the Earth has to be many thousands of years old, not a mere six thousand.

More science fiction – indeed science fiction as a rescuing device!

It’s amazing how much non-biblical material has to be invented to support an interpretation of early Genesis that doesn’t even fit the text itself!

Yes, it would have generated enough heat to boil the oceans and melt the planet back to a ball of magma.

Because the text doesn’t support it.

Why do YECers refuse to actually study the text of the scriptures? Why do they insist that ancient literature should be read as modern literature?

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There is no way to make sense out of it because there are two entirely different cosmologies involved. The opening Creation account in Genesis operates on a cosmology where the entire Earth was what we might call a single time zone: the whole Earth was in day, or the whole world was in light.

This alone is enough to tell us both that the Creation story writer didn’t know the Earth was a globe and that Yahweh wasn’t interested in accurate science.

Exactly! The writer of the first Creation story regarded the Earth as a flat disk a few thousand kilometers wide with a solid dome over it.

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

So you were already told where the deposits were, you just built on work done by others.

He does – the problem is your definition of things.

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

For what it’s worth, the presence of the deep and of the chaotic Earth are before Day One. The narrative structure begins each day with the declaration, “And Elohim said”, so Day One starts in verse 3.
This, BTW, is consistent with the account being a temple inauguration; a temple inauguration assumes that the general location for the temple is already there, and just uses seven days for making and filling the temple.

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Did I?

Where did bring up that I “consider the Bible a science reference”?

Again, I do not recall that, and that certainly was not my intention, where have I affirmed “that scientific proof is present and part of the purpose of the Bible”?

God Bless,
jon

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whilst that may or may not be a provable point…how would you explain that Gods revelation to us (through his prophets for example) was largely given via verbal and visionary methods?

Are you honestly going to make the claim that God’s visions of the earth to Moses were not of a spherical planet?

We know that the claim “early Christian church fathers believed the earth was flat, and or stationary in the universe” is a fabricated lie aimed at nothing more than supporting false theology and doctrine. It has been comprehensively proven that ancient Greeks, who under Alexander the Great ruled and directly influenced the Israelite nation hundreds of years before Christ, knew the earth was neither flat nor stationary long before early church fathers…

In the **5th century B.C.** , Empedocles and Anaxagoras offered arguments for the spherical nature of the Earth. During a lunar eclipse, when the Earth is between the sun and the moon, **they identified the shadow of the Earth on the moon. As the shadow moves across the moon it is clearly round.** [library of congress.gov](https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/modeling-the-cosmos/ancient-greek-astronomy-and-cosmology)

I would argue that in fact the reason for the conjuring up of the flat earth was the result of the Catholic church attempts to stifle religious investigation and freedom in order to maintain control over early Christians (which eventually resulted in the rejection of the shackles of the early Catholic Church, and the rise of the Reformation movment)

Also, how do you explain the apostle Peters’s words in 2 Peter chapters 1 and 2 where clearly the apostle writes about a literal historical account of Noahs flood and the physical literal destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorah?

1Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,

5For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge;

16For we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses

19We also have the word of the prophets as confirmed beyond doubt.

20Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation. 21For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

1Now there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies,

4For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them deep into hell,

5if He did not spare the ancient world when He brought the flood on its ungodly people, but preserved Noah,

6if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction,b reducing them to ashes as an example of what is coming on the ungodly;c 7and if He rescued Lot,

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I have done O&G wellhead engineering. If you were a energy company reservoir engineer and dismissed the procedures that are based on a deeptime worldview, you could not do your job and you would be gone.

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What you claim is not what the text says for the simple reason that you insist on reading the text from a modern worldview. You insist that your reading is correct, but I can’t understand how anyone can think they have a clue about what the scriptures say when they ignore the fact that God chose writers who wrote in their own literary genres – that are alien to us – and under their own worldview. You can only get “what it so plainly says” when you know what it is.

So why do YECers ignore the fact that the ancient scriptures were not written from our modern worldview? The scriptures were written to ancient audiences, and if God is intelligent at all He would have His chosen writers use the literary genres and worldview they knew so they could express His message in ways their audiences would understand!

We have to remember that not a single word in the scriptures was written to us – we are reading other people’s mail. If we treat it as being written to us, we will get it wrong.

And from where I sit, he needs to provide evidence that the Bible anywhere at all claims to be 100% scientifically and historically accurate, as well as evidence that it should be read as though it’s modern English literature rather than the ancient literature it was penned as.

Well said. That’s a point my first New Testament professor made emphatically and regularly, in agreement with my first literature professor who reminded us that we can only understand a piece of literature if we know what the writer intended it to be.

And mine is the text, always the text!

With a side order of “get your science straight”.

I say the same about the text: not taking it for what it actually is, is not an option. It’s plain in church history that treating the scriptures as something you assume they are is a quick route to false teaching.

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

The text does not say they were consecutive – they are labeled, “Day One”, “a second day”‡, “a third day”, etc. If they were meant to be consecutive there would be a definite article with the numbers, and those aren’t present.

‡ or “another day”

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

Not in the New Testament we aren’t.

The difficulty is because YECists pick and choose what to treat literally and what to ignore. In this instance, what’s being ignored is that the text as we have it assumes that it is day for the entire Earth and then night for the entire Earth – which is what we should expect given the worldview of the writer.

Another issue is that “evening . . . morning” is a phrase that outlines the night, not a whole day. But again that’s what we should expect since the ancient near east regarded night as a manifestation of darkness chaos that the gods had to defeat in order for the sun – on its chariot or barque, depending on the culture – to be able to pass untouched through the underworld and emerge to bring light again. The Genesis writer, however, is taking that repeated period of combat and declaring that the entire ancient near east was wrong: night is something YHWH-Elohim created for His purposes, not something to fear or stress over (“stress” being manifested by having temples where priests made offerings daily in support of the gods’ battle against darkness).

Of course for anyone who has bothered to find out what kind of literature the first Creation account is it would be obvious that it isn’t to be taken as a “literal 24hour-Day” because they days are not intended to be taken literally. Something that makes these literary types weird to us is that the days can be treated as literal for the purpose of understanding the point of the account even though they’re not meant literally in themselves – modern minds want it one way or the other.

That’s an assumption – the text doesn’t tell us how long, and the arithmetic that gets a hundred years is based on guesses that also aren’t found in the text. All we are told is that Noah was five hundred when he begat his named sons, and then that he was six hundred when they all went into the ark. A reasonable assumption would be that he didn’t start building until his sons were grown, which would limit it to eighty-five years at most; another reasonable assumption is that wood back then behaved like wood now and he would have had to deal with issues of insects and rot. It’s been shown that the ark as described could have been built in just five years assuming more than just his family for workers, and that twenty years would be the maximum before concerns about insects and rot would become critical, so the building time was probably between five and twenty years; I’d go with an average because it comes out to twelve, which is a very symbolic number in both the later writings of the Old Testament as well as in the ancient near eastern culture.

That’s not in the text, it’s a sheer rescuing device.

I second that motion!

Given all the YECers I knew in university that makes sense to me. They were very careful to work at not hearing, or letting anyone else hear, anything that might challenge the accepted positions.

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come on Ron, you full well know that is a ridiculous statement. You are overstating your own job descrip[tion and training. A well head engineer is not required to produce political or religious information regarding how old the earth is.

A wellhead serves numerous functions, some of which are:

1. Provide a means of casing suspension (Casing is the permanently installed pipe used to line the well hole for pressure containment and collapse prevention during the drilling phase).
2. Provides a means of tubing suspension (Tubing is removable pipe installed in the well through which well fluids pass).
3. Provides a means of pressure sealing and isolation between casing at surface when many casing strings are used.
4. Provides pressure monitoring and pumping access to annuli between the different casing/tubing strings.
5. Provides a means of attaching a blowout preventer during drilling.
6. Provides a means of attaching a Christmas tree for production operations.
7. Provides a reliable means of well access.
8. Provides a means of attaching a well pump,

your claim has nothing to do with the production of petroleum products. You are not a philosopher…so please don’t make errant claims of that nature.

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As we are told in the Bible, the flood was a supernatural judgement by God on the creation and as a consequence the mechanisms and processes that took place may be outside the realm of science.

An excellent article that addresses a question raised about the heat generated from accelerated nuclear decay by Shaun Doyle is below. I certainly don’t pretend to know the answer, perhaps there was no accelerated nuclear decay, perhaps some unknown other process caused the changes we observe and the loosely entrapped high quantities of He in the crystal lattices and other internal structures of minerals.
I just don’t know the answer, but as Shaun Doyle points out, science is not able to explain how the Red Sea was held back, and I would add, how the plagues in quick succession were sent upon Egypt, how Lazarus and Jairus and the young man in Nain were raised from the dead, how the sick and blind were instantaneously healed, how the water turned instantaneously into wine, how the lepers were instantaneously healed, how the deaf and mute were instantaneously healed, how the paralytics were instantaneously healed at Capernaum and Bethesda, how demons were exorcised from possessed people on many occasions as recorded in the gospels, how the storm was instantaneously calmed at the command of Jesus, how Jesus walked across the water to the boat, how Jesus rose from the dead, so I don’t understand why we should be at all surprised why science is equally at a loss to explain the phenomena we now observe in the rocks.

The article is titled, Too much heat in Noah’s Flood? published 25th July 2020 is at:

God Bless,
jon

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Hi John,
as is always the case, we all have our biases and leave out important information in articles such as the one that Jammycakes quotes to you regarding radio halos. Note what Dr Snealling actually says in the opening statements of the article (which jammycakes has intentionally ignored).

The hydrothermal fluids progressively replenished the supply of Po isotopes to the deposition sites as the Po isotopes decayed to form the Po radiohalos. Because of the annealing of α-tracks above 150°C, all the radiohalos only formed below 150°C. However, the U-decay and hydrothermal fluid transport started while the granitic rocks were crystallizing at higher temperatures. Therefore, the granitic magmas must have cooled rapidly or else the short-lived Po isotopes would have decayed before radiohalos could have formed. It is thus estimated that granitic plutons must have cooled within 6–10 days, and that the various Po radiohalos formed within hours to just a few days.

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Wellhead engineering, which is concerned with the mechanical and instrumentation, is not the same scope as the reservoir engineer, who is responsible for the geological modeling. These are people I worked and communicated with as part of project teams. You bet that someone who disregarded industry procedures would not be sticking around.

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Old Age Earth vs YEC has nothing to do with a subbranch of Petroleum Engeering (which is what yours is).

You seem to think that philosophical beliefs are paramount to a scientific knowledge of your job…that is a delusion. What you are in fact trying to claim is that other individuals with academic training and degree (like myself) have no knowledge and are incapable of performing their function in the workplace because YEC views prevent them from said tasks. I was formally educated as a school teacher (design and inductrial technology, often known as Technology and Applied Studies). I spent the majority of my teaching in state schools and my religious convictions never collided with my job description or my day to day activities as a teacher, or with other teachers i worked with in said state institutions. I am living proof that your claim is not only false, its a fabricated construct. To be honest, i find it insulting when individuals make claims that scientists are only those who subscribe to evolutionary beliefs. Evolution is not a science…its an interpretation of science. The sooner you get that into your skull the better!

[EDITED i corrected the subbranch of engineering]

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Thank you for explaining my job description from Wikipedia. At last I find out what I have been doing.

To repeat, I worked directly with O&G major geologists, all of who necessarily employed standard geological principles to guide exploration and extraction. You can be YEC and get by in many STEM careers, but achieving acceptable results as an energy geologist directly demands an understanding of every aspect of the history of the field including deposition and geological time. There is no room for all the pretend about floating vegetation mats and other flood fantasies.

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Thanks Adam, your honest and sincere words here are much appreciated!

May our Lord and Saviour give you strength and encourage you,

God Bless,
jon

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I think you can see how I was led to believe that was the case, though you are correct that I should not make assumptions and paraphrases, and I apologize for any misrepresentation of your views. So, it appears you have not

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Your truthful words here go right to the heart of the matter.
The truthful reality about the philosophical religion of evolution can be quickly summarised as:

Evolution definition, molecules to man ascension through time producing the diversity of all life on Earth.

Evolution is nothing more than a theoretical dogma that does not tolerate dissent, it is most definitely NOT science

Evolution has never been observed taking place.

The theory of evolution is not just improbable, it is mathematically and scientifically impossible.

Natural selection is real but can only select from existing genetic information, it is not a creative force and cannot create complex specified information.

God Bless,
jon

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And he then goes on to state:

Incredible amounts of heat must have somehow been removed rapidly by a process or processes that we have not yet discovered or understood, for otherwise these rocks and the radiohalos in them would have been vaporized!

He’s pretty much just said he’s not really interested in doing science.

BTW, I have to change my opinion of a certain science fiction novel I read long ago where someone came up with a beam weapon that did nothing but vastly accelerate nuclear decay. I couldn’t see how that would be a weapon, but point it at a planet . . . .

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Where is that in the text?

Where is that in the text?

You would be wrong – the flat earth-disk under a solid dome, with the underworld beneath the earth’s surface, surrounded by water all around, was how the entire ancient near east viewed Creation.

Except that’s not in the text either. We’ve been over this before, and what you want it to say just isn’t there.

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I have to ask what the frak you’re talking about!

So in your view there are no wellheads in drilling for oil. That’s weird.

That wasn’t true thirty-plus years ago when I was a university student, so it’s definitely not true now. In fact a Lutheran pastor in Bible class invited in a physics professor who explained exactly how it could have happened, starting with what the scripture says, that God used a strong wind.

Don’t mix spurious claims in with others that are more certain.

Science has no problem explaining it, the problem is an invented one.

And nothing in the text provides any foundation for speculating about science. Others have asked before, but I’ll ask again: why do you think the Bible teaches science?

Invoking science fiction does not constitute an argument.

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Hi Phil, thanks for your reply.

The fact of the matter though is that I certainly cannot see from the quotes you have provided why you have stated at post:79, topic:53022 that, I brought up that I consider the Bible a science reference,

I have never said that, and would never say that about the Bible.

Indeed in you third quote from my posts directly above, I would have thought it was abundantly clear that I will always trust the Word of God over science.

Thus I can only conclude that either:
1.) your worldview prevents you comprehending what should be obvious to anyone who calls themselves a Christian. or,
2.) your misread, made a mistake, or don’t understand what I have written, or,
3.) you are deliberately attempting to make me look a fool, by claiming that I think the Bible is a science reference.

I don’t know which of the above three is the reason but sincerely hope it is number 2.
I accept your apology and hope that settles the matter.

God Bless,
jon