Thank you for your reply.
Well as I have said before, we will just have to agree to disagree.
God Bless,
jon
Well Jon, you’re entitled to your own opinions and I’m not disputing that. But just remember: you’re not entitled to your own facts.
1 Like
I do wonder if Moses would agree with you on that one.
There appears to be a very poor opinion on this site of the overall intelligence of our distant ancestors, and their ability to interpret their environment thousands of years ago.
Just a thought, it is my personal belief that people back then closer to the creation, before the degrading effects of the curse had compounded over the millenia reducing the mental capacity and fitness of the population, were quite likely to be vastly more intelligent than we are now.
At the flood the loss of a vast amount of genetic diversity would have compounded the problem.
Way back then, they may well have used all of their brains instead of a small portion,they may have been more akin to what we today know as sauvants without the limitations that sauvants have today
Of course I may be wrong, but I do believe that we can’t just conveniently assume anything about Adam, Moses or what any of the Bible patriarchs thought.
God Bless,
jon
That’s not in the text.
Nor is that.
More that’s not in the text – it’s science fiction.
No, you don’t get it, or you wouldn’t be pretending that people here interpret the scriptures on the basis if theistic evolution! Or maybe you are so invested in your construct of the world that you can’t see what people are actually saying, so you stuff us into nice categories rather than actually engage.
Now you’re doing historical fiction.
False connection: the waw-consecutive can be used in historical records, but its presence doesn’t show that the writing it’s in qualifies as that. The construction links events but does not require that they are historical. I’m sorry, but Dr. Schrader is overstating the case – which he probably knows, but he’s got a clientele to keep happy and got his advanced degrees from a school that deliberately limits scholarly study of the scriptures; the same is true of the institution where he teaches.
Nope. That’s a common argument, but it doesn’t hold up even in the scriptures; in Daniel it is used to clearly mean a very long time, and that’s in connection with the “evening and morning” motif, so “evening and morning” doesn’t even necessarily indicate a literal day.
To cite a scholar who isn’t obscure:
Old Testament scholar and Hebrew linguist Gleason Archer (1916-2004), a strong advocate for inerrancy, wrote ”On the basis of internal evidence, it is this writer’s conviction that yôm in Genesis could not have been intended by the Hebrew author to mean a literal twenty-four hour day.”
I think he overstates the case somewhat, but his statement does make the point that the matter is not settled however much someone might like to think so. The entire article is worth reading:
The problem is that YEC arguments assume a modern worldview that does not apply to the ancient literature in question, so even if yom means a literal day within that piece of literature it cannot be used to argue that the creation took place in six literal days – however weird that seems, it is a characteristic of both literary types that the writer used in his account.
3 Likes
Yeah, if it was then there’s a problem: the atheist and agnostic students when I was attending university who came to conclude there must be a Designer because of their studies of evolution and ended up coming to Christ due to their understanding that out of all the scriptures of significant religions, only Genesis matches modern science (from which they concluded that the Bible constitutes a trustworthy message from the Designer, and so they read all of it).
That’s a fairly good way to put it.
One reason I say so is that YEC has this warped notion that the foundation of the Gospel is found in Genesis: it isn’t; the foundation of the Gospel is the Incarnation. We take Genesis as authoritative because the Incarnate Word did so, we don’t conclude the Incarnation happened because Genesis is scientifically correct.
We could throw out Genesis altogether and the Gospel would still make sense! Jesus told us, “Everyone who is weary and heavily burdened, come to Me – I will give you rest!” (which, BTW, makes Jesus the Sabbath of the new covenant). He doesn’t argue from the writings of the old covenant to call people, He calls them on the basis of what they already know: that they are broken, that life is hard, and they need rest.
Not so. I think you are confusing knowledge with intelligence. No doubt if any of us were time transported to that time, we would not survive long as our knowledge base and what they needed to know to survive do not overlap that much. Ancient people did well to thrive in their demanding environment.
Doubt that as well. No real evidence of advanced technology or of amazing leaps in written language. And infant mortality and overall mortality was quite high, judging by remains that have been found, so not all that good at health care either. It seems the super intelligent ancient man is total supposition to support a particular narrative. However, I must admit, my opinion of the mental capability of modern man fell quite a bit the last few years, so you may be right.
I would agree with you there. It is really a difficult thing to take ourselves out of our modern thought patterns and prior assumptions and put ourselves in their places. That makes translation and interpretation of scripture written in ancient time so hard. However, learning more about their culture and times helps us better understand what they wrote, and how God spoke though them.
4 Likes
It has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with worldview. You’re actually a great example: you can’t even see that you have a worldview that you’re forcing onto the scriptures, and you can’t entertain the idea that the worldview of the ancient writers was different!
Like jammycakes said, science fiction.
Just for what it’s worth, the idea that we only use “a small portion” of our brains was shown to be incorrect a couple of decades ago.
Yet you do it all the time!
At the time of the Exodus? We’d be welfare cases for a while till we adjusted – and that’s assuming we landed in a culture that didn’t equate “stranger” with “slave”.
At the time of Abraham? We’d be toast.
I still have to remind myself every now and then of the presuppositions behind some ancient literary types, and I have studied that sort of thing for years!
Oh, yeah – the first Creation account has ten times as much to tell us as a YEC reading of it does!
Hi Phil,
yep, I do think you hit the nail on the head right there.
That has been my experience too, 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 think it is important that we don’t allow, the enormous quantities of compounded knowledge to deceive us and be viewed as present day man being in any way superior to man at the time of Adam and Moses.
God Bless,
jon
1 Like
Hi Phil,
"*No real evidence of advanced technology*"??
As the world before the global flood was totally obliterated, I think you would have to agree that is not surprising.
Though if you adhere to the unbiblical Theistic evolution beliefs, and you don’t believe the clearly stated Bible text that all flesh was blotted out, totally destroyed, obliterated by the flood except for those on the ark.
I suggest that any remains would be buried deep down in the sedimentary strata somewhere in the Earth’s crust and any advanced technology present may not be what you would expect, and may not be recognised, even if on the extremely rare possibility that something was found from pre-flood.
Also, this begs the question what would you classify as advanced technology?
Obviously, we aren’t going to find an Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner in the deep sedimentary strata.
By the time of Noah, their were workers in various metals, carpenters and farmers and no doubt many other specialists. I suggest that the individuals back at that time in history would have been highly intelligent and resourceful and more than able to find solutions to problems.
“And infant mortality and overall mortality was quite high, judging by remains that have been found, so not all that good at health care either.”
I must admit that I was not aware that any human remains from the pre-global flood world had been discovered. As far as I am aware that situation is still the case.
It appears that you are talking about post flood people groups, you don’t identify where.
Sure there are any number of groups of people who have lost considerable quantities of knowledge that was once known, that is a given, both back in the distant past and now and as a consequence there are groups of people all over the world, then and now who have high infant mortality and poor health stats. But that is not the point here, intelligence is not marked by how well sound medical knowledge is applied. It is marked more by the ability of an individual to acquire and apply knowledge and skills available to them at the time.
God Bless,
jon
You have made this same claim on several occasions and roused my curiosity.
Please enlighten us in plain English, a list of the alleged ten times more information than what reading any of 63 carefully translated Bibles tell us in the creation account of Genesis 1.
God Bless,
jon
Yet you young earthists make a song and a dance about the fact that we get “soft tissue” in dinosaur fossils.
Here’s the thing. Advanced technology requires more than just advanced intelligence and knowledge. It requires more than just workers in various metals, carpenters, farmers and other specialists. It requires infrastructure. Masses and masses and masses and masses and masses of it. In modern times we have roads, railways, factories, mines, telecommunications cables, satellites and much, much more. Sure, we may not know what it looked like but we can be absolutely certain that it would be far, far, far, far more extensive, robust and durable than dinosaur soft tissue. The idea that the Flood could have preserved even tiny scraps of soft tissue while obliterating every last shred of evidence of motorways, railways, bridges, tunnels, factories, mines, telecommunication cables, buildings and the like is a contradiction so preposterous that it’s yet another FizzBuzz failure.
Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe did some investigation into where the “yom with a number” rule came from a few years back. They found that the first reference to it was in literature produced by the Institute for Creation Research back in the 1970s, and both before that date and outside of young earthist circles, the silence on the matter is deafening.
In any case, I seem to remember also reading that the way that the numbers are combined with “yom” in Genesis 1 are unique to Genesis 1.
Basically it’s a young earthist fabrication. Completely made up.
2 Likes
[quote=“jammycakes, post:172, topic:53022”]
Yet you young earthists make a song and a dance about the fact that we get “soft tissue” in dinosaur fossils.
Here’s the thing. Advanced technology requires more than just advanced intelligence and knowledge. It requires more than just workers in various metals, carpenters, farmers and other specialists. It requires infrastructure. Masses and masses and masses and masses and masses of it. In modern times we have roads, railways, factories, mines, telecommunications cables, satellites and much, much more. Sure, we may not know what it looked like but we can be absolutely certain that it would be far, far, far, far more extensive, robust and durable than dinosaur soft tissue. The idea that the Flood could have preserved even tiny scraps of soft tissue while obliterating every last shred of evidence of motorways, railways, bridges, tunnels, factories, mines, telecommunication cables, buildings and the like is a contradiction so preposterous that it’s yet another FizzBuzz failure.
Hi James, thank you for your post.
I must admit I am at a bit of a loss to understand how your basic infrastructure paragraph has anything whatsoever to do with the reality of the world in Adam to Noah’s day and has nothing whatsoever to do with the intelligence of people at that time.
I don’t know anyone who, [Yet you young earthists]** make(s) a song and a dance about the fact that we get “soft tissue” in dinosaur fossils."*
Soft tissue and unpermineralised bone are being found more and more inside dinosaur bone collections right across the planet, in museums, in educational institutions and in private collections.
There is no song and dance, it is simply an empirical fact that various proteins, blood vessels, nerve fibres, stretchy structures, haemoglobin, actin, keratin, DNA fragments of multiple base pairs still connected, and many many more real dinosaur soft tissue components exist, now here in the present, that have been ascribed evolution paradigm compliant ages from 65,000,000 to at least 300,000,000 years old!
Now it is you that brought this up and it is you that is always using mocking analogies about Star Wars, The Flinstones, and cartoon caricatures, so I wonder what you make of this fact that the abovementioned soft tissue and real unpermineralised dinosaur bone exists. Sure there are examples of mineralised dinosaur bone with soft tissue also inside them when the minerals were dissolved away, but how does bone last from 65 million up to 300 million years at least. Remember that some of the bones have been found just sticking out of the ground in places where daily temperature can range in summer months to above 40 degrees C, to below freezing in winter in the presence of plenty of Oxygen and water???
The answer is obvious, or should be obvious, the bones are simply not very old. Their amazing preservation is still a surprise to people like me who trust the Bible to say what it means and mean what it says. That is because at around about 4,500 years old the dinosaur bones are still ancient and the fact that soft tissue has been found is truly remarkable to last that long.
We know from over a century of empirical research in physics and chemistry that organic matter doesn’t last hundreds of millions of years. If ever there was a blatant fairy story that honest researchers are expected to swallow it is this one. The dogged somewhat religious adherence to the main story, i.e., evolution, prevents a sane assessment of the true age of the dinosaur bones and their contents.
As for your FizzBuzz nonsense, if ever there was a reason to apply it, the continuance of maintaining that an ever increasing inventory of dinosaur bone and soft tissue have inexplicably defied what we know empirically about physical chemistry and physics, must take 1st Prize in your FizzBuzz category.
Now if I have got my Post numbers aligned correctly, back on Post 136 you say the following:
I don’t see much empathy or grace on display, and as these things always have a habit of coming back at you, I am disappointed that the Theistic evolution devotees emphatically refuse to accept that everyday, ordinary basic rules of physical chemistry and physics, refute that the dinosaur bones and soft tissue that are being found all over the world are old as they continue to make them out to be.
Even several thousand years is a stretch of credulity for examples discovered in areas that do not have optimal preservation conditions, i.e., that stay well below freezing all year round, with no water or available Oxygen to degrade the organic matter.
But to continue to believe and worse to propagate the insanely enormous evolution based ages of 65,000,000 years to at least 300,000,000 years stretches credulity to well past breaking point.
I will trust the plain reading of Gods Word to us, the Bible that informs us the approximate age of the bones and soft tissue found in global flood sediments are likely to be around 4,500 years old.
4,500 years old is a very, very long time but it is a credible date for the bones based on scripture.
God Bless,
jon
I agree with that. That’s why in my OP I explain it first that before I read Genesis 1:1-5, I’ve already have a worldview beforehand which is “rotating spherical earth and daytime+nightime happen simultaneously on earth”.
So, enough until just verse-5, I can’t understand on the statement “Earth’s Day-1 started in the evening”. Because to me, the statement contradict my worldview (daytime+nightime happen simultaneously on earth).
If it’s argued:
you need to read another verse which say: For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth
But to me, it’s a circular reasoning because I have to agree first that “Earth’s Day-1 started in the evening”, which then after reading Exodus 20:11, I will automatically say : you see, “six days” in this verse support 6x24 hours creation.
Since I don’t agree that “Earth’s Day-1 started in the evening”, then automatically I don’t take For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth literally as 6x24 hours.
Therefore, the seventh day can only be understood as a normal [earth-rotation] day in history on which God ceased His creative work. Is the Seventh Day an Eternal Day? | Answers in Genesis
The above quote is a conclusion from Gen 1.
But again, based from my worldview, it can’t be that the 7th day started in the evening as I showed in my example about Singapore and Quito.
But the thing is, (at least to me) we don’t know :
- What is the author’s knowledge about his environment. Did he know that the earth is spherical rotates on it’s axis revolves around the sun before his revelation?
- In what style that the author get his revelation from God ? A vision (Audio+Video) ? Just an audio ?
- Before his revelation, what is his environment worldview ? Did they apply that their day begin in the evening (after the sunset) ? or in the morning (after the sunrise) ?
The whole earth = the whole spherical earth.
Did you mean that only after his revelation then he know that the earth is spherical ? Or did you mean, even before his revelation, everybody in his area already know that the earth is spherical, rotates and revolves around the sun ? Please cmiiw.
If that’s not just an assumption, I would be glad if you have an ancient Jewish text source (which of course not the Bible) as a reference for me.
Thank you, Jon.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
…
…
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.
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like