Fascinating David! I’ve lived in Leicester for 11 years now and had no idea. Divine intervention is openly invoked by virtually everyone but damnationism is only noticeable by the inhibiting bulge on the surface most of the time.
[Being of the Olde Worlde, the UK is mainly enured against frontier religion.]
May be helpful to review them after the broadcast. Most speakers are not scientists though.
Welcome, Jack. I also find Sumerian history interesting. I tried, a number of years ago, to correlate some aspects of ANE history – incl Sumerian – with what a YEC professor claimed. I did not really find support for what he said. However, it is an emotional view for many, including my professor. He gave me an ‘A’ anyway. The modeling used by YEC’s is based on certain convictions about what Noah’s Flood was able to accomplish and when it occurred-- based on what they glean from biblical chronology.
I will be interested in reading others’ remarks.
YEC dates for the flood are all over the map, from 2200 to 3000 BC. However, all of these dates absolutely destroy what we know about Egyptian, Eblaite, Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician, andAssyrian chronology. Any attempt at trying for reconciliation is pretty much laughable, as you have to fit more than 10000 years of history into 1000.
I was a YEC for over 45 years and I am no longer a Christian because of it. If they can be so stubbornly wrong about things we know for certain about this life, how can I trust anything they claim to know about the next life?
I thinks it’s a certainty that the universe wasn’t created only 6,000 years ago, there weren’t just 8 humans and a few pairs of each kind of animal alive on Earth about 4400 years ago, all humans weren’t living in the vicinity of a certain tower in the Middle East, speaking the same language about 4300 years ago, and (This is new creationist propaganda to me) people in America didn’t hear that Egypt was the only country in the world that had food to sell and then travel there to buy some. What fool left the only country in the world that had food and traveled 12,000 miles to America where there was none? These creationist organizations are making Christians look like fools.
I recently “converted” to EC after being an ardent YEC since I was a child. I got my degree in Bible Exposition from a conservative Christian university that is passionately YEC.
It has been scary stepping out, but I just cannot remain under the intellectual-throttle-cap a literalist view of Genesis requires. However, I know well why the YEC crowd so passionately preaches against anything old earth, and that is that they are passionately defending what they believe is the authority of Scripture, and that is to be commended. They see EC or even ID as a slippery slope that necessarily leads to gross immaturity at best but full apostasy in most cases.
Unfortunately, they’re taking a post-enlightment rationale and applying it to Biblical study far beyond any author or culture ever actually intended, and it actually distorts the Word of God rather than upholding it.
The thing that scares me is that if you cannot disciple folks in your church to uphold Scriptural authority AND faithfully pursue scientific evidence wherever it leads, you will have an entire generation of people who conflate the error of YEC with the Gospel itself. THAT is terrifying to me.
So Christian - don’t give up on your YEC friends, especially the younger ones, because when they figure out the error of YEC, they’ll need someone to show them how their faith can be, in fact, strengthened - not lost.
Welcome, Tyler. You are absolutely right on the mark with your comments about being there for the folks in transition. It was said by someone, I think blogger Richard Beck, that when going through a period of deconstruction, we need to intentionally work on reconstruction. Hopefully we can help with that process. This online group of ragtag folk have been a blessing to me when the church as I experienced it seemed pretty distant.
We look forward to hearing more of your story as you feel comfortable in sharing, and value your input.
Thanks, Jack…I agree with you. It does have to do, however, with how YEC figure the dates. That actually is where the disagreements with that branch of Christianity begin. I do appreciate their commitment to biblical truth. And many – yes – are fine people who live their faith. Fitting “more than 10,000 years of history into 1000” is doable if you postulate a worldwide calamity that essentially wrecked the geology of the earth, not to mention the flora and fauna, human life, etc. And with that there are other issues. Even Augustine questioned the literality of the six days of creation. But others did not in centuries past. As for the flood itself, I fall into the category of those who accept that something cataclysmic did happen in that part of the world, and it got recorded and handed down as the event we read about. Kramer, I believe, said somewhere that the Flood was early third millennium B.C. There was a history of flooding in that part of the world – before the modern era of dams, etc. So an event more cataclysmic than most — as Kitchen described it – is possible. Even the Sumerians had a before-and-after dividing line to their history–e.g., the Sumerian king list with those ancient life spans, etc… Swamidoss’ recent book has another intriguing theory on the flood event. And so does Heiser… Noll’s book (from a few years back) noted that the emphasis on the Flood story developed as an apologetic for Seventh Day Adventist beliefs about its founder who claimed to have been taken back in time and shown the actual week…I read her book of prophecies, and I found Noll’s insights to be interesting. Bernard Ramm, an evangelical writer of the 1950s, put the Flood at somewhere before 4000 BC but was skeptical of the idea of the ark landing on Ararat and various attempts at finding any remains of it there. Unger (in 1951)also said it took place “long before 4000 BC.” I read something by a researcher — who was not referring to the biblical Flood, but who postulated an event of some impact in May 2807 B.C. – a meteor impact that (he said) created a tidal wave that could have reached the Near East (causing the Flood), but which, from his set of interests, led to the Seth-Osiris myth and the beginning of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation cycle…So yes, it is an interesting subject —and I think Noll’s information puts the debate in a different light.
All fo which is interesting — and certainly meaningful in some way or other.
Hello Tim…and welcome back. I think your story interesting. It is true, of course, that – given an all-or-nothing approach to things – it is hard not to throw the baby out with the bathwater on all of this. That is especially likely to occur when some personal crisis coincides with the shift in beliefs about some aspect of things — in your case, the issue of a young earth and young universe. I also eventually stumbled over some of that. It did not make sense, I thought, to be excited when history and archaeology – and science – affirm something in the biblical text, and then to be completely dismissive of these academic disciplines when they tell you something you do not want to hear. It is understandable — for a time at least. I would recommend — just as a thought here — Mark Nol’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. You may have heard of it and maybe you have read it. I found his ideas intriguing, especially as they applied to the history of the modern YEC movement. And yes, I did eventually read his sources on that.
I have never heard the “emigrating to Egypt for food” theory. That definitely assumes that people in the Americas knew what was going on in the Near East very long ago. Highly speculative! Keep in mind—there is a lot of speculation about ancient history. I visited Plymouth Rock in MA a few years ago. A Wampanoag Indian re-enactor at that site told me — in some conversation – that there are Egyptian and Mesopotamian hieroglyphs in their language, but that this data is controversial. I will bet it is…and it would fuel any YEC theories in that direction.
All controversies aside…there is a fair amount of biblical text that has at least some corroboration, or is known to reflect cultural and historical situations quite well. See some of the debates (elsewhere) on the Exodus, the political/cultural/geographical information (etc) supplied to flesh out the accounts in the gospels, book of Acts etc.
You have to read around and look into these things for themselves. I find that ultra-skeptical people — the “new atheists” etc — are just as prone to over-extending their data as are YEC types …or you and me for that matter. There is no reason, for example, to disbelieve in Jesus of Nazareth as a person, Nazareth as a town (some New Atheists dispute its existence in that era) or the basics of his death etc., plus the resulting belief in his resurrection.
And now I am getting into many other subjects. I just think you want to consider whether you are over-reacting to your shift away from YEC. There is no need for it, although, as I have said, it is understandable.
@Jack_Naylor I was quite surprised when I heard Jeanson talk about the “global famine” of Joseph’s time. I wrote this as a FB post as my response:
A few years ago I wrote the linked piece as satire. It was meant to call attention to the fact that the Hebrew words used in Genesis 41 to describe a severe famine at the time of Joseph are the same as that used to describe Noah’s Flood and creation. I said that if young-earthers applied a consistent hermeneutic it would require them to believe that the severe famine of Joseph’s time was a global event. Furthermore, peoples from the entire earth would have been fed by Joseph’s storehouses of food. Hence even Native North and South Americans and Australians must have experienced famine and traveled to Egypt to get food at this time.
As I said, the piece was satire and meant to call attention to the fact that the language in the Bible need not always be interpreted universally.
However, it has come to my attention that Dr. Jeanson at Answers in Genesis is promoting the exact literalism of this passage that I was satirizing. He has proposed in a publication in their in-house journal and in multiple seminars that there was in-fact a worldwide severe famine about 700 years after the Flood which was the time of Joseph. In a twist he proposes that the peoples of the earth had not yet spread to the America’s since leaving Babel just a few hundred years earlier (Note, that requires that the earliest that man arrived in the Americas would be just 3800 year ago!). He proposes that people from every single people group (Chinese, south Africans, all European groups etc…) made the journey to Egypt to bring back grain during this time.
I do commend Dr. Jeanson for applying the YEC hermeneutic more consistently than other YECs. He believes the bible requires that the entire world suffered severe drought and that all peoples came to Egypt and so he goes about looking for evidence of such events occurred to support what he thinks is the only consistent biblical view. He seems to have taken to heart my message from the end of my satire piece:
“This is ultimately about the authority of God’s Word, which plainly teaches that the Famine of Joseph was global in extent. Indeed, if the text of Genesis 41 clearly teaches—as it does—that the Famine of 1700 B.C. was global and we reject that teaching, then we undermine the reliability and authority of other parts of Scripture, including John 3:16. God’s Word is trustworthy and authoritative in all that it affirms.
These and many more biblical, theological, and scientific considerations make the compromise of a mere local famine, so often promoted by liberal seminary professors, totally untenable. This is all ultimately about the authority of all of God’s Word, which plainly teaches that the Famine of Joseph was global in extent.
We all have the same data. It’s really a question of the worldview we interpret that data though and when viewed with the right worldview “glasses” the biblical and scientific evidence support a global famine.
It is time to recognize and defend the historicity of one of the most profound events that has taken place in earth’s history. No less than biblical authority is at stake.”
Dr. Jeanson has done exactly as the title of post suggests. He has provide another answer from Genesis. He has said that the authority of scripture requires that we look at the events of Joseph as a global event that has been overlooked by most people up until now.
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2017/04/01/answers-from-genesis-reclaiming-the-biblical-authority-of-josephs-global-famine/
Another example of Poe’s Law.
From Wikipedia: Poe’s law- is an of internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
The original statement, by Nathan Poe, read: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.
It seems that we will soon have no objections from the text. They’ll be taking the Psalms literally, “as that’s what the text requires”
Well, Joel…not nice of you to have done that!! Did you somewhere make clear in that earlier post that you were speaking tongue-in-cheek!!! Maybe he just “happened” to get the same idea from elsewhere? such as the controversy over the genealogy of some Natvie American language symbols?
If you read the original post, it is very clear in the footnotes that it is a work of satire – and not only that, Joel says:
This text was copied from The New Answers Book 3 published by leading Young Earth Creationist’ apologetic ministry Answers in Genesis except I replaced references to Noah’s Flood with Joseph’s Famine.
So it was a satire with a very specific goal – not to make fun of anyone, but to use the very words of YECs to show how inconsistent their interpretation of specific words in Genesis is. In my view, that’s the best use of satire, because it can put blind spots on display very clearly.
If we never satirized or had comedy relating to YEC doctrine, I think we might all go insane.
sorry Laura…
No need to apologize – I just thought some more information would clarify.
Thanks…well, some sort of apology is in order. I find the subject interesting at any rate.
This reminds me long ago of an effort to create a parody of the National Enquirer. It failed because no one could tell the difference between the NE and the parody. The creators of the parody could not dream up stories more outlandish than the original.
I had one YEC friend who told me that he thought the RATE project was a parody.
Given the fact that they were trying to hand-wave away 22,000°C of heat from accelerated nuclear decay, I’m not surprised.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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