No, he’s saying that doing honest science is part of the job. It has nothing to do with philosophy.
Really? You just testified that you have no relevant degree, so all your assertion here constitutes is an attempt at misdirection.
Of course it is – it is a robust theory from which hypotheses can be made which can be tested.
If evolution is not a science, neither is astrophysics, meteorology, or geology.
My Episcopalian geology professor pointed out that very thing in his lectures when he spent a week telling the class about his work as a geologist for a petroleum company.
BTW, just a note: if you have floating vegetation mats, you won’t get coal – not that a global flood allows for coal in the first place.
The moment you assert that you have passed out of the realm of truth and reality.
Odd then that every single biology professor I had loved dissent.
Except it has, both in several sort of mundane examples I’ve given previously and the more startling one that entirely new species of plants were found growing around bomb craters in London after WWII.
Ah, deceit by neglect – you left out the fact that mutations can and do produce new generic information that gets filtered by natural selection.
You’re conflating two very different things here: flat earth, and moving earth. You are correct that the ancient Greeks already knew the earth was spherical and even how big it was! But they (and nearly everybody else up to and even after Copernicus) very much believed it was stationary. This was ‘common knowledge’ among everyone - Christian or not. And Christians (when some like Galileo started poking at geostationary certainties) even brought the Bible to bear by showing that it very much agrees with - even teaches (if we use the same flattening eisegesis that YECs force on scriptures) that the earth is stationary. And back then they had excellent scientific reasons for thinking so too - which is why the vast majority were all in for spherical earth, but so few of them would have conceded anything like a moving earth.
Firstly, he offers no theory for accelerated nuclear decay. How are the relevant electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces parameterized to decay a billion times faster? What are the cosmological implications of moving the dial? Without the theory, it is just meaningless hot air.
Two - whatever the decay pathway taken, the energy released is a simple matter of the mass lost to arrive at the products. The yield of the Hiroshima bomb represented about 0.7 of a gram of matter spent. There are hundreds of trillions of metric tons of radioactive isotopes contained in the Earth. You would essentially nuke the Earth, so you can forget about preserving radiohalos or anything else.
Three - Not only is accelerated radioactive decay not supported by science, there is nothing in the Bible indicating any such happening. The water rose, the water fell, and has nothing to do with nuclear decay. The whole idea was concocted only because radiometric dating is devastating to young earth dogma.
Thus St.Roymond it is clear that you have not even read this post because if you had, you would or at least should realise that I have never stated that I, “think the Bible teaches science?” so why do make these imagined accusations as if they are based on fact.
With regard to your first question, “Why? What scriptural principle prompts this?”, I will repeat, I will always trust the Word of God over science because the Word of God stands forever, is trustworthy and true, because Jesus believed that the Old Testament was the Word of God and Jesus believed that through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the words of the Apostles were the Word of God. And Scripture cannot be broken. That is good enough for me.
You would appear to differ on that, thus I can only conclude that the compromised Biologos oriented belief system that combines Christianity and evolution has you pedantically pouncing upon true and straightforward honest words of others who don’t accept evolution or deep time and words I have written, to wit, “I will always trust the Word of God over science”!
You would do yourself a great service if you were to search for the Spirit of the Word of God rather than the letter of the Word. The spirit of the Word comes from Love for us all by our Creator; He does not wish that any of us should perish.
As we are all Christians, it is vital we love one another, care for those in need and less fortunate than ourselves and trust in the Word of God.
When I see on the daily news bulletins the terribly evil atrocities occurring around the planet right now, I know that there but for the grace of God go I.
Well that’s a fascinating concept, except that I know of many, many thick coal seams over broad areas here in Australia that consist primarily of jumbled and smashed up conifer tree trunks that have turned into coal. The same thing is found in Antarctica.
I don’t know of any other event that could smash billions upon billions of forest trees into broken pieces and then bury them under hundreds to thousands of feet of sediment except a monumental flood of a severity that we have not seen anywhere since.
If those coal seams aren’t the result of the global flood of Noah, then how did they get to be there?
Oh come on Jon. You’re not just talking about miracles here. You’re talking about pointless miracles.
What practical purpose would accelerated nuclear decay serve in Noah’s Flood? None whatsoever. There are plenty of ways that God could have wiped out almost all life on Earth leaving only a handful of survivors to start afresh that don’t require tinkering with the fundamental laws of physics in ways like that in order to do so.
No, the only practical purpose that accelerated nuclear decay would serve would be to make the Earth look older than it really is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable. Same with catastrophic plate tectonics, which would also have to have been in extraordinary lock-step with accelerated nuclear decay in order to produce the correlation between radiometric dating, distance and direct modern-day GPS readings that we see in places such as the Hawaiian islands. Then you have to add on another miracle on top of it to remove all the heat that these processes would have generated—another utterly pointless miracle that wouldn’t have been necessary if radioactive decay rates and plate tectonics had been left to run their natural course. Again, these are miracles that serve no purpose whatsoever other than to make the Earth look older than it really is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable.
When I read about miracles in the Bible, I always see God using them for one purpose in particular: communication. Generally, the more spectacular the miracle, the more important the message. What you are talking about here is not that. What you are talking about here is not an action consistent with the God of the Bible, who tells us that He cannot lie and that His handiwork is an accurate reflection of His character and nature. You’re talking about the actions of a capricious and deceitful deity who would abuse miracles in order to mess with our minds to such an extent that it was no longer possible for us to tell what is real and what is not. Not only is this not science; it isn’t Scripture either. It’s the Omphalos Hypothesis crossed with Q from Star Trek, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and Slartibartfast from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Such nonsense doesn’t uphold the Bible; on the contrary, it makes a mockery of it.
What you appear unable or unwilling to understand from the plain words that I have already written on this matter, is that it is quite possible, indeed probable and likely that we do not have a clue how or why and the cause is something we know presently nothing about. I made the point that we just don’t know.
It is quite possible that accelerated nuclear decay did not occur at any point, and the mechanism is something we know nothing about!
Among a plethora of other supernatural events, do you know how dead people were raised back to life, or how water instantaneously can turn into fine wine?
I believe miracles have happened and that nature can be transcended. I just do not see evidence for a global flood four or five thousand years ago; on the contrary there is a pervasive and detailed record of continuity. I would love it if it were otherwise, but the verdict is in.
Hi Ron,
thanks for your honesty about what you believe.
I guess we will just have to agree to differ on this one as all I can see wherever I look on the planet is dramatic evidence for the global flood of Noah. I see water gaps where water poured off the land masses as they were lifted up and the ocean basins sank down. I have seen polystrate coalified tree trunks that run through many, many solid rock strata.
In fact what I have observed with my own eyes and what I have read in searches of the literature confirm in my mind that the flood of Noah’s day was global and destroyed all life on the planet that had the breath of life in their nostrils. The Bible tells us precisely the same thing that the flood was global and destroyed ALL life on the planet that had the breath of life in their nostrils. The Bible doesn’t say some of the life in a small local area, it states all life.
Although I have already posted this scriptural passage it is worth stating it again as there is zero room to accommodate a local flood myth.
Genesis 7
*****20 The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered. **
*21 So all creatures that moved on the earth perished: birds, livestock, animals, and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; ** 22 of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. ** 23 So He wiped out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from mankind to animals, to crawling things, and the birds of the sky, and they were wiped out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark.
you left out the fact that mutations can and do produce new generic information that gets filtered by natural selection.
Yes it does, if natural selection can see it,* yet it is my understanding the vast majority of random mutations observed having occurred, areinvisible to natural selection, and so are not weeded out and consequently the flawed information slowly spreads and accumulates into the genomes of the overall population over time, generation after generation. In any case the direction of change is downward, the opposite direction required, (for evolution in the ascent of species diversity sense), if evolution were a real phenomena. It clearly isn’t!
Again, as you have stated that: “mutations can and do produce new generic information that gets filtered by natural selection.”
Again, I agree that is absolutely true, but what you didn’t mention is that in the vast majority of cases the mutation results in the loss of highly complex genetic information, through nucleotide deletions, insertions or duplications, which is what I presume Biologos/Evolution belief constitutes the engine room of evolution. That new information may on extremely rare occasions may confer a benefit to the organism but that doesn’t balance the books, or even come anywhere close to near it.
Simply put, you can’t lose $999.99 from every $10,000 you invest and still make a profit, you go broke very quickly even if/when you may rarely have a beneficial or two that make an additional $0.01 or $0.02 cents. The book keeping just doesn’t add up!
If it wasn’t for the unimaginably brilliantly designed, built in redundancies with brilliantly programmed adaptability to a broad range of environmental conditions that our loving Creator bestowed on genomes, from creation, the slide downhill would be much faster than it already is.
What this means can be readily (*simplistically I admit, but it serves the purpose to get the point across without misinterpretation I hope)*, demonstrated by an English paragraph of text that is a quantitatively and qualitatively poor but nevertheless is a useful proxy for DNA information where each English letter represents one of the four nucleotides **adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)**and Uracil (U) if we include RNA in this scenario.
Sure the English text has many more letters, but as you would know, the information content in DNA is vastly greater and denser and when you take into account in most sections of information between sugar ribose strands with H dipole bonds, multiple information codes, reading in both directions, as well as starting at various positions, and add to that the roles of epigenetics, having a few more English letters is not an insurmountable problem for this analogy. The text is a quote from John Sanford talking about the evolution believing critics of the observations he has given the name Genetic Entropy.
The ‘experts’ mentioned below are very well-credentialed scientists. Yet, they are not experts on the specific topic at hand. They have not spent the last twenty years studying the problem of mutation accumulation. Their six objections below are just ‘off the cuff’ statements that do not seem to reflect careful consideration. They naturally feel like they need to say something, but they only offer vague and dismissive comments. If this is all they have, I am amazed, and very encouraged!
Now apply some simulated/proxy mutations, i.e., nucleotide deletions, insertions or duplications over a hundred or so generations at this hypothetical mutation hotspot:
Thx ‘exxxrs’ xxntionedlow vxry well-crexxenxaled sxxxntixts. Yt, they re xxt xperts on the sxxifxc topic at hxxx. Txey xxve spxnt spxnt spxnt the lst last txxnty studxing the prblm of mutation accumulation. xxxir xxx objexxxns xelow are juxx ‘off the cuff’ cuff statexxt xxtmxxn ts that do not refxxc xxreful carefu consideration. They natxxur feel likxe they ed toto say soxxhing,sovvhing t thxx only ofxxr vague and dismissive comments. If this is all they xxve, I am a and xery enxoxxxx
**Yes this is a very poor analogy, it doesn’t do the magnificently brilliant design of DNA justice, but it gets the point across! … … … … The information is lost!
In the real world the information would of course code for the stuff,the structures and control processes of life. On rare occasions the mutational loss of genetic information may confer a benefit but as far as I know there will almost always be a cost to the organisms fitness should it end up in in other environments that don’t favour the mutation.
With DNA, the mutations overwhelmingly are near neutral (but still slightly deleterious) or they are just straight out deleterious. Either way, unless the mutation causes severe effects that prevent the ability to reproduce, the mutations will often be passed on to future generations. And so it goes, on and on generation after generation. Incessantly accumulating. The downhill effects of the curse on creation continue to degrade genetic information century after century.
We see plenty of examples of extinction, but ostensibly that is all we see.
Species live, reproduce, degrade and vanish, for a broad variety of reasons no doubt, but amongst those reasons, I have no doubt that genetic degradation from unrepaired mutations contributes and likely quite significantly. Watch this space over the next decade or two…
Where we are time-wise, on this downhill ride I do not know, but as we were created by God in the beginning, I can only think that we are less perfect than our parents, even more less perfect than our great grand parents and so on.
The fact that the first people could marry and reproduce with close relatives supports the un-mutated state of their genomes in around about the first thousand years after Creation. The flood bottleneck changed everything and as we know, reproducing now with a close relative now is very likely to cause serious disability, birth defects and/or death at or soon after birth in many cases.
Again the direction is downhill, the opposite direction required were evolution a real mechanism for the creation of the diversity of species we see, rather than being an elaborate unduly glorified myth.
" Natural selection is real but can only select from existing genetic information"
Natural Selection is NOT a creative force and CANNOT produce the type of change required for diatoms to change into dogs over billions of years. That is just a wishful thinking fairytale for the masses to believe rather than submitting to the palpable reality that the Lord God is their Creator and they are accountable to Him as clearly taught by scripture.
Jesus is LORD of ALL.
The truth of the matter is that the Bible clearly tells us that Noah had three sons Shem, Ham and Japeth before God commanded Noah to build the ark.
I find it difficult to imagine that Noah could have built the ark in around about 12 years or even 25 years.
The Bible makes no mention whatsoever of any external assistance, the only people mentioned in the text are Noah, his three sons, and Noah’s wife, and his sons’ wives, a grand total of eight people.
Of course that doesn’t mean there weren’t any external helpers but in the absence of anything in the text, to apply the standard that you vehemently apply to others, using your own words, it doesn’t say that in the text.That is just a construct that you have put upon the text.
Now I don’t want to be nit picky, but clearly you need to realise that you cannot dish out over and over again that we just can’t assume what we want. If it isn’t in the text, then it isn’t admissible by your own standards. You chide me for making a reasonable assumption, your own words,"*… that’s an assumption – the text doesn’t tell us how long,…" then, and even though you protest when others make reasonable assumptions,you make them yourself here as shown in bold type the words, "reasonable assumption" and other words also that transgress your own standards, in the quote from your post at the top of this post… … …
Now that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, or put another way what’s good for the goose is good for the gander as the old sayings go.
We simply can’t assume that it was a quick construction job of about 12 years to build the ark as though it was being built as we build timber boats today. It was enormous at three hundred cubits long, (about
450 feet long) by 50 cubits wide, (about 75 feet wide) by 30 cubits high (about 45 feet high), a massive vessel. Interestingly, the hull design has been modeled according to Biblical dimensions and tested in a maritime seaway test tank and found to have optimum stability in rough sea conditions. See Safety investigation of Noah's Ark in a seaway
Firstly, Noah couldn’t just ring the local timber yard and have the wood already cut, milled, shaped, dressed timber delivered by semi-trailer to the ark build site.
He would have had to travel into the forest, select suitable trees, then manually fell them, by axe or a hand saw, then cut them into manageable logs again by hand, then either drag the logs using strong animals or cut them up where they fell by hand, then laboriously transport the cut lumber back to the ark build site piece by piece, before he could even begin to start building the enormous ark.
I don’t know how many trees he had to fell, but it would have to be many thousands, of course the final number would depend on the girth of each tree and how much usable timber was extracted from each one. That work alone would have taken decades just to amass the necessary timber for the build.
We are told that the timber he used was gopher wood; now we don’t know what that timber actually is in present day tree names, or even if gopher wood trees still exist, they may have become extinct at the flood,we just don’t know.
Noah was told to pitch the ark wood on both sides, I presume to protect it from damage, insect attack and to make the wood and ultimately the seaworthy vessel watertight. Here in Australia we have many hardwood species of timber that are very strong and able to withstand rot and insect attack for periods ranging from many decades to many centuries mainly dependent upon how well they are protected from water. A few typical species in eastern Australia include Tallowood, White Mahogany, Ironbark and Grey Gum.
Anyway, Noah would also have had to find a suitable reliable source or sources of good quality pitch and then also transport it to the ark build site.
Remember, they didn’t have any mechanised timber processing equipment, no chainsaws, circular saws, electric planers or thicknessers. It all had to be done by hand. They probably only had adzes, axes, chisels, hammers, hand saws and string lines and not a great deal else.
Genesis 6
8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.
10 And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
14Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.
16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.
17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.
18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.
19 And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
That field of study is literally the substance of population genetics. It is Sanford who is out of his league here. His publication record is very thin, he has had little exposure to primary peer review, and attracted next to no attention in terms of citation and secondary review. His book is targeted to a naive audience rather than academic geneticists, and the few who are familiar, including Michael Lynch whom Sanford has cited, and textbook author Joe Felsenstein, have been critical.
If natural selection cannot see it, in what way is it deleterious? Not in terms of fuzzy or abstract language about flawed information, blah blah, but specific expression of a concrete physiological outcome by way of example? You are probably on your own here, because I’m not aware of Sanford ever providing such. There is plenty of deleterious mutations in the human gene pool for instance, which result in various diseases and syndromes, but they are selectable.
A mutation which occurs in a highly conserved region of a protein coding gene may result in failure of embryonic development and is definitely selectable. A mutation which occurs in a stretch of DNA which neither codes nor regulates likely registers no effect at all from a nucleotide substitution. There is no phenotypical variation, let alone fitness effect.
Population geneticist Zach Hancock provides pretty thorough YouTube responses to Sanford here. The topic requires wading into genetics, and so, apologies, these videos are longer and I really cannot provide summaries or timestamps for them. They are there if you are interested.
Calculations from a few previous posts (with updates):
Given that Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium are the most common radioactive elements, we can get an estimate of the energy released by looking at them. Both Uranium and Thorium require about 1 half-life to go by in six months, and Potassium-40 about 4 to produce the measured ages. Given their abundance in the earth and earth’s mass, that is roughly 6x10^44 becquerels. Alpha decays emit about 10 MeV each. Hence, 4.5x10^32 joules get poured into the earth in that time. For reference, that is slightly more than Earth’s binding energy, or about the amount of sunlight that hits the earth every billion years. That is also enough to raise temperatures at 1500K/s, re-melting the crust in about a second and vaporizing the earth in 5. By the end of six months, the ball of plasma once known as earth would be (assuming that it stayed the same size) about 55 MK, producing a Planck curve which peaks in keV x-rays and outshining the sun by 9 orders of magnitude, thus contributing 15% of the energy outputted by the galaxy.
Hi Tim, thank you for your interesting post on this matter.
I have already posted, on this topic that we just don’t know enough, as I have said before, there may have been no accelerated nuclear decay, the cause of the phenomena we see in the rocks may well be due to something we do not have the slightest inkling of at present.
Who knows what the reasons are for what we find, there may have been a brief period of rapid expansion of the universe controlled by God during the flood, that resulted in the CMB, there may have been changes made to the fundamental constants of the universe controlled by God during the flood, there may have been other factors that we know nothing whatsoever about, the point is we just don’t know enough!
Things like, for example “the Big Bang”, “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” are in my opinion quite tenuous ideas that no doubt amongst a raft of other reasons were dreamed up to escape the inevitable consequences of admitting the universe was created By God, who rightly did so for God’s glory.
And with that tacit admission inevitable consequence follow, of acknowledgment to our Creator, recognising we are His and that we should obey our conscience as God is Love and is Holy, Righteous and Just.
Qualities that are rejected by far too many fallen sinful humans full of slander, malice and other worse evils. We are all fallen and all of us need His gift of Salvation given to us by His grace, although we do not deserve it, I know I certainly don’t deserve His Love and Forgiveness.
So we struggle to understand and make sense of the creation.
Science is a useful tool that has provided mankind with a system to understand more about the creation, but science has limits as to what it can and can’t do. I think far too many of us, put science on a pedestal that is not warranted.
The Bible, the Holy Spirit and our God given conscience are the only guides we need to find salvation and know His love.
So to repeat, whether there was Accelerated Nuclear Decay (AND) or not, we just don’t know; if there was, then we still don’t know how the AND happened, i.e., the cause; nor do we know how the intense heat produced was dissipated, if AND ever happened, again, we just don’t know.
Well if there was no accelerated nuclear decay then the Earth must be billions of years old and not six thousand. Period. End of story. Discussion over.
This is because there is no way whatsoever to get lead into zircon crystals in the quantities that we can measure in geological samples without nuclear decay from uranium. And we do know enough about physics, chemistry, crystallography and basic geometry to be absolutely certain of this fact. And no, there are no “secular” or “humanist” or “evolutionist” or “materialist” assumptions involved in this. The methods used to figure this out are exactly the same for Christians and atheists alike, no matter how old the earth is or who or what did or did not evolve from what. It’s simply a matter of measurement and mathematics.
The only way that you can get 4.4 billion years’ worth of lead into a zircon crystal in only six thousand years without accelerated nuclear decay is through a miracle. And since such a miracle would serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever, it would be a deceptive miracle whose only effect would be to make the zircon crystals look older than they really were.
And what you appear unable or unwilling to understand from the plain words that I have already written on this matter, is that it is quite possible, indeed probable and likely that you haven’t grasped exactly what the “something we know presently nothing about” has to account for.
You have to account for the fact that different measurement techniques, whose assumptions and methods are different, give the same answers as each other. That’s why I talked about the need for accelerated nuclear decay to be in lock-step with catastrophic plate tectonics and a whole raft of other things on top of that as well. Whatever other processes you think may have been involved, they would have to reproduce that lock-step in such a way that hundreds of thousands of measurements are not only all wrong by up to six orders of magnitude, but all give exactly the same wrong answers as each other. Being wrong simply doesn’t work like that, and even processes that we don’t know about don’t work like that either. The only things that could work like that are intentional, widespread scientific fraud on an industrial scale so vast as to be patently ridiculous, or deceptive magic.
No, but I do know that they were clear and visible to those who witnessed them, that they served a specific and identifiable purpose, they communicated a clear and identifiable message, and they did not skew high-precision measurements in such a way that millions of different measurements all gave the same wrong results as each other.
I appreciate your thoughts, and agree that we must all approach things with a humble spirit.
I agree that we should not push science beyond its limits, and make it say what it cannot address. In the same way, we need to read the Bible for what it is, and not add to its message, making it say something it is not trying to say… In that regard, I feel that Dawkins and his like and Hamm have a lot in common.
With creation and science, we depend on the interrelatedness of scientific inquiry, the consistency and agreement of those data points, and draw conclusions that are coherent and agree with the data observed. Thus, we see the age of the earth consistent with astronomical data, and that being consistent with radioactive decay, both on earth and in meteorites that date to the beginnings of the solar system, And that is consistent with erosional patterns and geological formations, which are consistent with plate tectonics and such features as rift valleys and the Hawaiian Islands, And that is consistent with the change of biologic creatures in the geologic layers and their distribution, which later is consistent with the interrelatedness of life forms hinted at by morphology, and now just in last few decades shown to be consistent with the commonalities and the changes in DNA.
In scripture, we see the consistent story of God through a diverse group of writings over the years, giving a message of grace and salvation, but just as science does not speak to those themes, neither does the Bible speak to science, except in accommodating to cultural beliefs to communicate God’s message.
Precisely, and I don’t know either, and that is my point, I believe the miracles Jesus performed happened but I do not have the slightest inkling of how!
The global flood was also a supernatural event commanded by God and I do not have the faintest idea of how it happened, but I know it did because the Bible tells me so, and I trust the Bible. Whether or not accelerated nuclear decay occurred is speculation, and it has its problems sure, but that doesn’t mean it should be thrown out as a possibility.
If we follow your line of reasoning, then lets throw out the Big Bang, Dark Energy and Dark Matter, because in a similar fashion those ideas have significant problems as well.
The point that I have been attempting to make is we just don’t know enough to be as dogmatic as you seem to think we should be about things that occurred in the distant past.
As it is for everyone, your worldview will determine to a very large degree how you see the evidence, where you see conflicts, and what you end up concluding from your understanding.
Thank you Phil, I certainly agree with what you have stated here in every aspect.
I do not have much knowledge of what Ken Ham states, nor do I know much of what Dawkins has to say, except that I did watch a debate between Dawkins and John Lennox and wasn’t impressed by Dawkins at all in that debate.
The interpretation of the data here will depend greatly on one’s worldview; Deep Time Believers (DTB’s) will interpret the data according to the framework by which they view the world, likewise Biblical Creationists (BC’s) will interpret the data according to the framework by which they view the world.
It really is a battle of worldviews going on here, the data is the same for both, but the interpretations are radically different in many aspects.