Sure it did. The taste.
Thanks for the confirmation.
I have explained to you why it seems absurd to me to expect veracity from the prophets when it comes to prophecy but not when it comes to history. If you don’t think it’s absurd, that’s up to you, but in no case is what you’re proposing an interpretation of the Bible. Rather, it is a non-interpretation of the Bible - that is, you are, in effect, choosing to ignore the Bible when it comes to matters of ancient history. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’ve misunderstood some of the prophets’ statements about ancient history, but I’m completely unwilling to ignore them whenever modern historians make conflicting claims.
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The matter is not as simple as “Either Earth is 4BYO or God is deceitful.” For one thing, the very concept of “the appearance of age” can be tricky to employ. Presuming God created Adam and Eve as adults and not infants, is it fair to say “God created them with the appearance of age”? I don’t think so. God created them; it’s would-be observers who think in terms of “an appearance of age.” Is God obliged to imprint a time stamp on the foreheads of the inaugural couple to keep His reputation for truthfulness?
Consider this fictional conversation post-Adamic nap:
God: Well, Adam, here’s woman! What do you think?
Adam: She looks as old as me. Where’s she been?
God: She’s not been anywhere; I just made her.
Adam: But she has the appearance of age!
God: Okay, but I’m telling you that I just made her.
Adam: You expect me to believe that?
God: Would it help if I put it in writing?
When scientists tell me in their books that even though it seems to me that I’m sitting still I am actually spinning around at speeds approaching 1,000 mph, revolving around the sun at roughly 66,000 mph, together flying through the Milky Way at some 432,000 mph, I believe them. Why then, if it were so, could a scientist not be expected to believe that even though it appears to him that the earth is billions of years old it is actually only thousands of years old if God told him so in His book? Is faith to only go one direction? If laymen can trust scientists, can scientists not trust God?
It’s not as if God is asking us to ignore appearances. We are flesh, and have to live within them. He’s just asking us to trust that there are greater prevailing realities of which we should also be aware.
(I am not here making the argument that YEC is right and OEC is wrong. Rather, I am explaining how “Either Earth is 4BYO or God is deceitful” obscures important nuances and is thus too simplistic a formulation. This is why I say it feels like a false dilemma to me. Therefore, if OEC is right, it is right for reasons other than this argument.)
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Digression
Other than the arguments we have about it, would we live any differently if the age of the earth was something other than what we believed?
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What appearance of age would she have? Age, not maturity. Parents? Photos from childhood? Memories of teen years? High school exam results? Where would Adam get the idea that she had been around for years and suddenly just wandered into the garden?
Again this is not analogous, this is God clearly and explicitly arranging a situation in which there is no false appearance of age.
Where are we told that the taste gave the false impression that the wine had been produced over years of vine growing, harvesting, fermentation, and bottling? You’ve ignored all the reasons why your analogy was false. There’s no indication that Jesus deliberately created the wine with a false appearance of a fictional past.
Agreed. The steward assumed the past based on the taste - he knew of no other way the wine could have tasted as it did.
The same appearance of age every adult has - the appearance of not having been born yesterday.
But this doesn’t address my point; Jesus did not create any evidence which gave a false appearance of age. There’s no actual chain of evidence indicating age. Once again this is a false analogy. It’s not like the huge chain of evidence from multiple perspectives, which shows the earth and universe are very old.
But no actual chain of evidence indicating age. God didn’t create any such evidence. Eve had no memories of childhood, no evidence of birth, no wearing on her teeth, no scars or scabs from falls and scrapes in youth, no evidence of a past.
Once again this is a false analogy. It’s not like the huge chain of evidence from multiple perspectives, which shows the earth and universe are very old.
You write: “I’m completely unwilling to ignore them whenever modern historians make conflicting claims…”
So let’s examine an example: the Classic case is the New Testament claim that the O.T. contains the prophecy of a messiah born to a “virgin” (or young woman, or whatever).
Virtually any Hebrew scholar can confirm that the O.T. text in question was a prophecy about a child born centuries before Jesus was born.
In my view, the historicity of Jesus (The Divine, The Messiah, The Christ, The Man, The Son of Man) is not affected a bit by interpretation that the OT prophecy is not actually about Jesus.
But on the other side of the coin, how can we give Biblical Prophecy a higher reliability of face value truth than our own eye-witness testimony provided to us by evidences from Geology, Physics and all the other converging corroborations regarding the age of the Earth?
This is literally the test case for comparing the inevitable conflict between what is real vs. what is imagined by the writers of various Biblical Narratives!
On one hand we have a cosmic truth about the age of the Earth… and in the other hand we have a supposed proof text (which even when wrong doesn’t change the reality of Jesus) which is a proof text for someone else entirely.
How can you rank an illusion to be of higher value than reality?
You are right, but my Adam and Eve example was not intended to address the quantity of evidence. It was intended to address the separate but equally important point that “the appearance of age” is something found in the perception of the observer, not in the design of that which is observed. Therefore, it’s inappropriate, and even unfair, to impute deceit to the designer when the age we infer turns out to be inaccurate - and all the more so if He tells us, in writing no less, the facts that transcend appearances.
Now, lest I be miusunderstood on this point I am making here, let me repeat the coda I gave above:
@Mike_Gantt, you are attempting to use one category of events as proof for all categories of events. How do I mean this?
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You present us with cases where God could have reasonably employed his mastery over nature…
And expect us to consider All of God’s mysteries to be equally explained. -
While @Jonathan_Burke 's points regard such things as fossilized creatures that apparently lived long before large mammals came to exist! Your template of interpretation cannot apply to such cases … because there is no reasonable explanation for why such fossils should exist … other than as part of an Old Earth scenario.
You speak as if the two are mutually exclusive - as if the fulfillment of first precludes the fulfillment of the second. Yet the Old Testament is full of historical events - some prophesied, others not - that foreshadowed what would be fulfilled in the life of Jesus our Lord.[quote=“gbrooks9, post:78, topic:36232”]
But on the other side of the coin, how can we give Biblical Prophecy a higher reliability of face value truth than our own eye-witness testimony provided to us by evidences from Geology, Physics and all the other converging corroborations regarding the age of the Earth?
[/quote]
You have no such eye-witness testimony. What you have is inference from observations. I do not say inference from observations is invalid, but I do say that it is not eye-witness testimony. You are stacking the deck against the biblical testimony, and it leads you to conclude with a leading question which implies that the prophets deal in illusion while scientists deal in reality. Such reasoning is unworthy of a fair-minded person.
All I am attempting here to do is demonstrate how “appearance of age” is a concept that can be easily misunderstood and easily misapplied. Can you not acknowledge that?
And you would be wrong about the meaning of “eye-witness testimony”.
The eyes can reliably tell us about things in the past…even when we have not lived long enough to have been “personally present” to provide the other kind of witnessing.
In fact, evidential analysis is frequently more trustworthy than the flawed perceptions of those who were personally present for a given event.
You prove my point by demonstrating that they are not the same thing.
Is that how you use a dictionary? A word can only mean One Thing… and so all the other uses of a word are false?
“Eye Witness” can validly apply to the personal observation of facts which have only one possible interpretation.
Your intent to wall off a vast cosmos of information about the past, in order to defend a Genesis history that was Also never personally seen, is the mark of religious zeal…not the mark of rationality.
You and Ham exploit the limits of epistemology (“how humans know things”) in order to defend what you can never witness yourself.
Unfortunately, all the other kinds of witnessable facts oppose your conclusions.
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That is just your assumption that taste comes from a long process. See how your assumptions influence your interpretation?
It is an interpretation that is just as valid as yours. The only difference is we have different assumptions. And please stop characterizing my view as a non-interpretation.
I don’t ignore the ancient history. I just don’t view it in the same extreme way that you do.
But what made you realize that you had misunderstood?
I have mentioned it before and you appear to have chosen to ignore this point, but the Bible strictly viewed as a book of history has problems. Lots of problems. Consider just the genealogies. Why don’t they match? Why do the apologetic writers have to come up with explanations for these mismatches? Why are the genealogies in the LXX considered more accurate than the ones in the Masoretic text? Why is there no record of the children of Israel being in the land of Egypt at the time indicated in the Bible? BTW, there is archaeological evidence that indicates they were there, just not at the time indicated in the Bible.
But I have already addressed this. The fact is that the earth and the universe look very old from every perspective, and they both have a lengthy chain of evidence indicating a deep past.
So as I have pointed out several times, you need an analogy which looks like this.
- A false appearance of age from every perspective, no matter what the perspective is
- A false appearance of age accompanied by a lengthy chain of evidence indicating a deep past which is actually fictional
You’ve repeatedly advanced analogies, but none of them have matched the topic under discussion.
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I’m not trying to get a laugh. What I am trying to show you is that allegories will not say that they are allegories, so trying to find an interpretation of the Genesis creation myth that allows for evolution is like trying to find an interpretation of Aesop’s Fables that says animals don’t talk.
Also, I am not using “myth” in a derogatory manner. Myths have been used to convey truths for a long time now, like Aesop’s fables.
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If God gave Adam scars from injuries that he never suffered, would that be deceptive? For the appearance of age in the Earth, we have the same exact thing, which are radiohalos. These are scars in rocks produced by the very slow decay of radioactive isotopes, and they take millions of years to form. The round brown spots in the picture below are radiohalos:
So would God form the Earth with these scars already in the rocks?[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:73, topic:36232”]
Is God obliged to imprint a time stamp on the foreheads of the inaugural couple to keep His reputation for truthfulness?
[/quote]
By putting radiohalos in rocks, God is putting a time stamp in the rocks, and an old one at that.[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:73, topic:36232”]
Why then, if it were so, could a scientist not be expected to believe that even though it appears to him that the earth is billions of years old it is actually only thousands of years old if God told him so in His book?
[/quote]
Scientsts conclude that the Earth is ancient for the same reason that scientists think that the Earth is hurtling through space: because of the evidence.
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