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

Faith & Science Conversation
121

I write that you say that the Bible teaches science because you keep saying it. The statement “I trust the Word of God over science” means you think that the Bible is 100% scientifically accurate, which means your position is that the Bible teaches science. So there’s no imagination required, just paying attention to what you say.

But you define that to mean that the Bible teaches science!

Evolution is irrelevant – what matters is the text. You refuse to humble yourself and ask what the text itself says, not what you think it says from an English translation. The only place evolution enters into the picture is because you claim that it contradicts the scriptures – which means you think the Bible teaches science.

You need to start at the beginning and ask of each part of scripture, “When was this written? What type of literature did the Spirit-chosen writer choose? What was the writer’s worldview?” By not answering those and addressing the opening Creation account from that perspective you effectively throw 90% of the Creation account in the trash – and that’s where my objection comes from: by treating the Bible as teaching science, you trash the message and thus cripple the ability of others to understand what the Spirit and the writer had in mind.

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122

That’s exactly what you wouldn’t find if there was a global flood because in that case those seams wouldn’t be coal, they’d be sedimentary rock with petrified wood.

Besides which, calculating backwards from the known amount of coal in the world the result is that the entire planet would have had to been solid forest with trees a kilometer tall – and that’s just the coal we know about.

So on two counts coal proves that there was no global flood, which is good because the text doesn’t claim that – and in fact couldn’t claim that because the writer’s cosmology had the earth as a flat disk surrounded by water and covered by a solid dome, with water all around including beneath the underworld.

Then you must not have taken high school science, or your school was negligent, because when I taught high school freshman general science coal was one of the topics. To get coal swamps are needed where plants that die fall into oxygen-poor water and very little soil sedimentation occurs – conditions a global flood does not match.

Noah didn’t experience a global flood; that’s an idea that is imported into the text.

They got there due to swamps with forests where trees and other plants grew rapidly and dropped a lot of organic material including themselves, where the dead vegetation piled up in low-oxygen conditions – and eventually no-oxygen conditions when they were deep enough in the accumulating material. These swamps were primarily in regions that were sinking slowly, which meant that the swamps didn’t get filled up as dead plant material accumulated. To get enough plant material for a coal seam one meter deep the layer of dead plant matter had to be ten meters deep, which can only happen over many years, indeed hundreds of years at least, because even in the best growing conditions no forest can be knocked down and make a solid mass ten meters deep – and there are coal seams that are ten meters deep! This assumes, BTW, that all the swamp water has been squeezed out and only plant material is left.

Then there has to be a change in climate and geography such that soil sediments bury the meters-deep plant matter and keep burying it – and this has to happen in calm conditions that don’t disturb the buried plant material. The burial has to happen slowly, over many years, as well (the chemistry ends up different if compression is rapid – and in fact geologists can tell how quickly the plant matter that became different coal seams got buried due to those differences).

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123

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!

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124

Hi St.Roymond, thanks for your reply.

I understand what you are saying here, though that is not where I am coming from.
Perhaps its a cultural difference, perhaps its me, I truly don’t know, but when I say, things like "“I trust the Word of God over science”, what I am meaning is that if a conflict arises between matters, subjects, issues, narratives call them what you will, I will always defer to Gods Word as the final authority, thus for a simple example:
If Gods Word clearly states the flood of Noah was global, and in conflict, Secular and Christian people who identify as scientists make claims such as the flood of Noah was a local event, along the lines of the Gilgamesh flood, that they claim history and empirical science supports, then I will always defer to Gods Word.

And I reiterate, I have never stated that I, “think the Bible teaches science?”

I hope that clarifies the apparent misunderstanding here.

God Bless,
jon

125

The answer to that is just a google away, so presumably you are aware of the geological account. Why do you dismiss that?

It is not as if peat bogs are some wild speculation secularists cooked up so they could sin on the weekend. They are found all over the place, you can visit any number right now. And stagnant, acidic, low oxygen water does preserve against decay, that is why dozens of ancient bog people have turned up from peat operations, to wind up being stared at by museum visitors.

The progression from peat to lignite, subbituminous coal, bituminous coal, and on to metallurgical grade coal are not sharply defined but rather continuous. So bog regions would start the whole series.

River channels do switch back and forth and estuaries are subject to sea level undulations, so that fits well with the fact that coal reserves have partings, whereby seams are separated by layers of sediment, but otherwise in the same location. This does not fit with any singular event. Bogs can just sit there, soak up photons, and grow for millions of years. A short, high energy flood event would be dispersive, diametrically opposite of what is required.

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126

Those aren’t a problem for deep time. In fact we know how they occurred, in processes one of which is demonstrated at Spirit Lake near Mount St. Helens: dead trees sink with the root balls down and lodge in the lake-bottom sediments, and they stay there as sediments build up. They don’t rot because the water they’re in is oxygen-poor; a tree can remain intact underwater like that for millennia. This shares a feature with the more common process: the roots are in clay that anchors them, keeping them upright for long periods of time. Another process is rapid burial by a landslide.

If that literature is from the sources you commonly cite, you’re getting pseudo-science – they aren’t doing research to discover truth, they’re finding ways to twist and otherwise misrepresent the data in order to fit predetermined conclusions.

You would do far better to listen to material from men such as John Walton, Tim Mackee, and Michael Heiser, devout scholars who let the Bible be what it is instead of trying to force it to fit some mold.

All life in the land. In verse 21 “earth” should be rendered as “land”, which in context means the known world. In verse 23 where your quote says “land” it’s actually “dirt”, the stuff land is made of, and “earth” is again the known world.

Almost every English translation in existence followed the Roman Catholic view of the flood being the entire world rather than the known world, which they got from the Greek understanding where they made the same mistake that YEC does: reading their meaning of words into the words in the text, thus turning and even in the known world into a global event.

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127

Nope. There are documented cases of bacteria developing new abilities that improve their survival ability.

Nope – in the vast majority of cases, mutations do nothing.
In the times when they’re deleterious, they get filtered out; when they’re good they get preserved.

If you think that kind of math is relevant, then you don’t actually have a clue about the theory of evolution.
I couldn’t care much less if evolution is true or not; I care that people get their information straight. And both you and the sites you tend to cite don’t have correct information in sight.

It’s not a poor analogy, it’s a totally useless analogy. Anyone who thinks that changing letters in words is analogous to mutations in DNA needs to go back to high school freshman science.

And again you treat scripture as teaching science – why? If it doesn’t teach science, then it can’t contradict evolution, and evolution can’t contradict it.

Why don’t you actually study scripture by finding out what kinds of ancient literature the writers selected by the Holy Spirit used? Why don’t you investigate their worldview so you can get a feel for how the original audience understood the writing? Why do insist that scripture must fit your modern worldview – especially since that is the same mistake the Roman Catholic church has made repeatedly?

The vast majority of Christians understand that the ancient writings we have in the Old Testament collection were written as ancient literature and shouldn’t be read as though they are the English writings some friend’s great-grandfather put in his journal of things he experienced. And when they grasp – or are shown – what the scriptures actually say in their original context, they learn ten times as much from the first Creation account as can be gotten from a YEC reading, for the simple reason that then they are getting the message the writer and the Holy Spirit intended!

And those Christians do in fact “[submit] to the palpable reality that the Lord God is their Creator and they are accountable to Him” and rejoice in the beauty in Creation!

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128

But that is the standard fairytale and doesn’t match what is really there, at least in this part of the world. At the top and bottom of the smashed tree trunk coal seams is a thin band (about 1 foot thick) of leaf litter, sticks and twigs, that looks like it was put there yesterday. There’s not a lot of difference to what I see on the ground in the bush around where I live. There is absolutely zero evidence of any ancient swamp, no mudstone, shale or soil horizon, or peat or compost or other swamp base material that one would expect to be present if the swamp myth was a real process, however, what we do find is that there are clean finely graded particle size sandstone above and below each seam and in places there are many seams about 10 feet thick on top of each other separated by 10 to 30 feet thick layers of finely stratified sandstone with immaculately clean straight boundaries between each sandstone later.

The peat bog myth has been propagated for many decades and is taught in educational institutions all over the world, but it sure doesn’t match what I’ve seen in the field by any stretch of the imagination!
I can only conclude that it was dreamt up by a person with a ‘deep time’ worldview.

God Bless,
jon

129

There were no assumptions involved – the figures I gave were calculated by engineers who build ships, assuming the methods that would have been available to Noah.

130

Really???
Get a grip, mate.
You even use the word assumption yourself in your assumptions!!!

God Bless,
jon

131

and there is an evening, and there is a morning—day one.

Jon, I’m sorry, I can’t find that Genesis 1:5 say : Earth’s Day-1 started in the evening

But of course, I can arrive to [Earth’s Day-1 started in the evening] conclusion only if in my mind say “verse 5 is telling a progression of time”

then verse-5 in the paraphrase style:
and the whole earth for the very first time experience an evening, then after 12 hours, the whole earth for the very first time experience a morning.

And that is THE TRUTH according to the YEC ???

132

So you think that the Hebrew scholars back before Galileo or Copernicus or others were trying " to escape the inevitable consequences of admitting the universe was created By God" when they endeavored to explain on the basis of the Hebrew how God’s creation of the universe happened?

There’s no admission. You continue to ignore evidence that many atheist and agnostic scientists laugh at the idea that they do what they do because they’re trying to avoid God, just as you continue to ignore the evidence that scholars reasoning just from the Hebrew essentially came up with the Big Bang and deep time centuries before there was a scientific world to come up with those same ideas. And you also continually denigrate faithful Christians with unfounded assumptions and wild claims.

What you write here is the very same sort of thing that drove hundreds of university students to laugh at Christianity and Christians and drive hundreds of Christian students to abandon their faith, because you make God and the Bible look like bad jokes. And you do it all not on the basis of scripture but out of belief in a worldview that is inherently atheistic!

Yes, we do: there was none, because God is faithful and trustworthy and does not play such games with His universe, rather He runs it according to the rules He chose and can be trusted to always, and to have always, run it that way.
A deity who changes how His universe runs on the huge scales you propose is not Yahweh, it is Loki, the Norse god of mischief.

I had a YEC roommate at university who did a term paper on zircons. He chose the topic to try to show that they could fit a young-earth paradigm, but he ended up conceding that there’s no way to make it work.

That’s the conclusion that rocked him back on his heels.

Happily, he’d never fallen for the YEC notion that if there are “errors” in Genesis then the whole Bible is untrustworthy; he knew that the foundation is the Incarnation, and knew there was more than enough evidence for the Resurrection to believe in what Christ did for us.

I vaguely recall a chart in one of my geology professor’s office that showed something like six or seven different ways of dating things, all independent. I wish I had a copy!

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133

Hi Reko, thanks for your post, I really don’t know the answer.

It is sufficient for me to know that the first day started, and God created light, I guess we can also deduce that time started then as well as it was the beginning. Thus time commenced in the beginning, then light was created and light was separated from the darkness and all that was completed on the 1st Day.

The later verses regarding light such as in verse 4 relates to the creation of the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars.

God Bless,
jon

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134

If the polystrate tree trunks we find from time to time are sitting on the bottom of a lake for millenia whilst they are slowly buried, where is the bioturbation, where is the interlaced leaf litter that is washed down each year into the lake? The polystrate tree trunks I have seen are embedded through clean sandstone, have no other litter or organic material present, anywhere near the exposed polystrate tree trunk cliff edge, but there does exist amazingly consistent finely graded sandstone layers of uniform particle sizes in each layer with sharply defined layer boundaries.

The answer is of course evident in the rock strata surrounding the polystrate tree trunks, they were buried rapidly, probably in a matter of minutes or hours, by high velocity water flow, they were clearly not buried over millenia. Which explains perfectly why there is no bioturbation or interlaced leaf litter that would have been washed down each year into the lake for the presumed thousand years or more?

It is as simple as that!

God Bless,
jon

135

Why not “thus night commenced in the beginning” ?
In the beginning night of the Earth, God created the heavens and the earth

136

Congratulations, you’ve just quote mined me. That in itself is a FizzBuzz failure. Now go back and read what I wrote after the word “No”.

No, because the problems are not “requires millions of measurements to all give the same wrong results as each other.”

What part of the word “consilience” do you not understand, Jon?

The rules of measurement and mathematics do not depend on anybody’s worldview. They are the same whether you are a Christian or an atheist. They are the same whether you are dealing with “operational science” or “historical science”. They are the same whether miracles are involved or not. They are the same whether buying and selling is involved or not.

I have made this point repeatedly over and over again. Get your facts straight, man.

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137

My point exactly. That’s what I mean by “FizzBuzz failure.”

Just about every young earth argument that I’ve ever seen demonstrates a complete and utter cluelessness about the most basic, elementary principles that you learn in the first half hour of the first practical class of any A level physics course worth its salt.

And don’t get me started on the ones who don’t believe that measurement applies to anything other than buying or selling. Anyone with that level of ignorance about measurement needs to go back to primary school.

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138

Yes Riko, it may well have been dark when God created in the beginning, in fact if we look at the sequence stated in verse 1, “In the beginning” is stated prior to “Let there be light”, so you may well be correct, that it was dark, though it would have been completely dark as there were no celestial bodies to cast their light upon the Earth, thus God separated Light from absolute darkness on the first day.

There really isn’t much more I can tell you about this, but there is a very short video at:

and also vastly more importantly, there is a Q and A page at:

and an interesting article about resurrection and creation is at:

God Bless,
jon

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139

But how that dark is the first hour of earth’s first night if earth itself has not exist yet, Jon ?

Thank you for the link., Jon.
But the link is talking about sun etc, while sun, moon, etc is not my topic.

One of your link ask:

How could the first 3 days be measured without the sun?

But what I am asking is:
How the first hour of the Earth’s first night be measured without the earth ?
In the beginning night of the Earth, God created the heavens and the earth

140

There is the answer to that question right there, the Earth’s first night was not measured without the earth because the Earth was created in the Beginning. i.e., the Earth was created and then the rest was created successively.

God Bless,
jon

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