Ok, what am I missing here?

@Truthseeker1 Since you appear to want to drag in Dr. Sproul as an authority perhaps you should consider the fact that he doesn’t agree with what you are arguing. In support of that statement I offer " A Reformed Approach to Science and Scripture" by Keith Mathison which is available as a free Kindle download.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H19A4FY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I haven’t finished reading it yet but it appears to refute your statement quite nicely using Dr. Sproul’s own words.

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Where in Scripture does it state that Genesis is either literal or figurative? I think that any attempt to reconcile Genesis with a modern world view is a dubious way to prove what is true. Modern understanding is going to trump what Genesis says. However all other ANE creation accounts take the same evolutionary aproach that Modern humans take. It would seem to me that they took all authority of the written word as figurative of some exact truth that was lost to humanity.

Is Genesis different in the aproach it takes to state what actually happened, when compared to all othe ANE accounts? I think my issue is throwing out what is literal, just because it appears figurative. I also think that to God 36.5 million years would still be a YEC position if a day equals 1000 years. If a thousand years is standard life to man, then God views that as 36.5 billion years, so 14 billion is a mid life crisis.

Why would God deceive or mislead humans if the universe had the appearance of 14 billion years, especially if God “just” expects us to take everything figuratively instead of being “just” closed minded literalists? Trusting science to give us info on what Genesis states whether literally or figuratively; is shaky ground to begin with, as science evolves. Genesis is what it is.

I think that the big question is was God lying with the record of the Word; or was God lying with creating a mature universe. I am not sure we have evidence of a earth that has been spinning for 4 billion years. We do have evidence of a earth with the appearance of 4 billion years that is only a few days old in God’s view.

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I think I need clarification here. Many of today’s dog breeds have only been developed within historical times, many within the last few hundred years. So these dog breeds were certainly not created as is. The same can be said of many domestic varieties of animals and birds. Examples of observed speciation are rarer but there probably are a few examples; the London Underground Mosquito is a possible one.

Perhaps what you’re saying is that we can observe new varieties and species appearing in the created kinds? E.g. the London Underground mosquito is still a mosquito. I would agree with that.

34 posts were split to a new topic: What Is Information?

Like I observed before words “as-is” are not in the Bible, nor anything meaning that they will remain their own kind. And nor does the Bible use the words “after their own kind” in conjunction with reproduction. Instead the Bible uses the words “according to its kind” when it says God made them. And so what shall we make of this? That each creature had a kind before God even made them? Isn’t that exactly what evolution says? Evolution shows that living creatures did not pop into existence from nothing but evolved from creatures which were already there: all varieties of birds from flying creatures which came before them, all varieties of carnivores from carnivores which came before them, all varieties insects from insects which came before them, all varieties of fish from other fish before them, all varieties for flowering plants from a flowering plant which came before them, varieties of non-flowering plants from non-flowering plants which came before them. And god made these earlier creatures in the same way: all the varieties creatures living out of the water from creatures which first came out of the water, and all the seed bearing plants, flowering and non-flowering from seed bearing plants which came before these, and all the varieties of seedless plants from the seedless plants which came before them. And so on and so forth God made all living things according to the kinds of living things which came before them in a branching tree just like evolution and the fossil record shows us.

So once again you can see that the actual unaltered words of the Bible agree far better with what the objective evidence shows and it is only by adding words and changing the Bible do the creationists make the Bible contradict the discoveries of the honest inquiry of science.

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A post was split to a new topic: More AIG Hyper-Speciation problems

Genesis 1:1-5 (NIV2011)
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
Mark, welcome.

Here is Gen 1:1-5 and it has nothing about evolution in it, so I dee no issue here between the Bible and evolution, except all this happened on 1 day, but the Big bang took place within 1 minute.

Yes, the Biblical account seems to day that the Universe was created as is, even though we know that the world is constantly changing. Certainly God is not going to say something that is clearly false.

Therefore it seems clear to me that God was speaking in short hand, not trying to nail all the facts down because these4 were not important to what God was saying, which was 1) God created the universe ex nihilo; 2) God created the universe within time and space; and 3) God’s actions are intelligible.

You are mistaken. Evidence for evolution is the fossil history which shows how life forms evolved into current forms, including humans. DNA is a verification and back up in that the genetic story affirms the fossil story. There is no indication in Gen 1 that God created different forms of life out of a common , material, but science indicates that God did.

You right to say that there is no contradiction between the Bible and Evolutionary Creation, except for those who think that God needed to speak to ancient prescientific people using the same language that we modern folk understand. In other words we are to think that God had to tailor the Bible for our use, rather than the use of the people to which it was addressed.

If you want a different understanding of God’s Creation, please read the beginning of the Gospel according to John.

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Go
“When God made everything good and perfect in Genesis one it did not neccessarily mean kind and loving. It meant mature and complete.”

@Timtofly, God could have done it that way, but one of the big problems is that we see history as well as age. If you are not familiar with the Omphalos Hypothesis, read here and note why most reject it, as it makes God a deceiver.

That problem of having a world that was inconsistent with the Truth and the Light was what lead me away from that interpretation.

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When the Bible gives us pictures using different imagery to reveal the same concept, it suggests that imagery shouldn’t be pressed too far. When Jesus speaks of the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, the woman seeking the lost coin, and the father seeking the lost son (Luke 15), it’s best not to cobble them all together and form a picture of God as literally a female shepherd who sired sons.

That’s obvious. But when we stop treating the beginning of Genesis as God’s last word on creation, similar clues appear:

  • In Genesis 1, God creates like a human ruler who makes decrees during the day, takes the nights off, and rests on the seventh day. The creation of living creatures spans four days.

  • In Genesis 2, God creates like a potter who forms creatures from dust and fires them with divine breath. The creation of living creatures (forming a human, growing a garden/orchard, forming the animals) happens in quick succession, though without an explicit timeframe.

  • In Job 38, which unlike Genesis is presented as God’s direct speech without human narration, God creates like a master builder who measures carefully, sets the earth’s cornerstone and the rest of its foundation, then walls it off from surrounding floodwaters. God takes ownership for creating living creatures without giving a timeframe.

  • In Psalm 104, God wears many hats: builder, warrior, governor, gardener, agriculturalist. Here God continues to actively create living creatures to the psalmist’s day (vv. 27-30).

These accounts disagree in the literal picture of creation they present. They use different time frames. But are we supposed to simply piece them all together to arrive at the facts of how and when? Or are we to ignore a few of them and insist on the details in the one or two we like the best? I think that, instead, each one reveals important truth about God’s power and involvement in creation. We do best to read them with as much care as we read Jesus’ parables, not reifying them into literal pictures that contradict each other or God’s creation itself.

It’s worse than that. The biblical account states that the way you get variety in a kind of creature is by influencing what the creatures look at during mating (Genesis 30:25-43; note particularly the “thus” or “in this way” in the final verse). Somehow this idea, present in the Bible for millennia, has failed to take biology by storm. (I don’t even know of young-earth creationists who incorporate it in their alternative to evolution, though it would seem an easy fit. How did the feline kind diversify after the flood? Some felines looked at the toppled remains of forests, trunks of every shade stacked on top of each other, and gave birth to tigers. Other cats contemplated the receding waters, dotted with the upturned remains of fish, and gave birth to leopards.)

The Bible doesn’t seem that interested in showing the boundaries of created kinds. For people, we do have texts that show that different nations are related. Ham has a son named Egypt (Gen. 10:6), for instance, showing that Egyptians are human too. I wouldn’t want to press that verse to disagree with what has been found about the actual origin of the nation of Egypt, but it still has value in showing the unity of humanity.

But the Bible doesn’t have similar verses showing that Bovidae had three children called Ox, Sheep and Goat. We simply aren’t given enough information in Scripture to reconstruct the roots of supposed created kinds. Instead, what seem to be modern species, even ones largely distinguished through domestication, are found from the earliest pages. Perhaps the scope of heredity is another of those secrets that it was the glory of God to conceal, and the glory of God’s image-bearers to search out (Prov. 25:2).

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Metaphor based thinking is ubiquitous in human cognition and communication. Most of the time metaphors are conceptual, not just literary devices that highlight a point of similarity by describing one thing in terms of another (like we learned in lit class).

Humans use metaphors derived from domains of embodied human experience to reason and explain more abstract domains all the time. One of the major errors people make in critiquing Genesis interpretations is assuming that metaphor has to mean “fancy poetic stuff” as opposed to something humans normally use to communicate.

Conceptual metaphors can’t be reduced to a literal meaning. They are the foundation of the cognitive process itself. If I say, “My anger was simmering under the surface, but when I heard the news, it just boiled over into rage,” there is no way to get behind the metaphor ANGER IS A HOT LIQUID, because that is how anger is being conceived of. You lose elements of meaning if you say, “I was somewhat angry, but when I heard the news I got very angry.”

Same with the creation story that depends on underlying conceptual metaphors of God as an artisan/ruler and creation as work. Those conceptual metaphors are part of the communicated meaning. God is not literally a human worker who takes the Sabbath off, but the metaphor of God as a human worker is foundational to understanding the abstract idea of God as creator.

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@Truthseeker1 ? Are you still here?

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Adding the word “false” to a phenomenon does not make it false, unless there is proof of motive to do so. Now “did it convince humans” may be proof of motive or just coincidence. If God knew from the Beginning that it would, is that motive enough?

If an omniscient being wanted people to have choice without any forced manipulation, lying to them and dececeiving them may be legitimate but not malicious.

I am not sure if living with the notion that God did everything to go against what I choose to believe is a very satisfactory notion.

Welcome to the forum. This debate is relatively insignificant in comparison to the saving grace Jesus has provided through his life, death and resurrection. The problem is however very important in that the perceived conflict of evolution and the Bible causes many people to reject faith and causes many people of faith to reject science. I am a biochemical engineer who has been studying the Bible for a number of years, with an approach that I was not going to let what I don’t understand get in the way of what I did understand. What I understand now is the Bible is the Word of God, to be taken literally. I have a fundamentalist view of the Bible.

Through my studies, one thing popped out at me that in Genesis and other books the genealogy leading to the Messiah was always given after the genealogies not leading to the Messiah. For example, Cain is given before Seth, Ismael is given before Jacob. This is consistent all the way through, with one exception, Adam. This led me to the conclusion that Genesis 1 and 2 are sequential, the creation of the Garden and Adam comes after the events of Genesis 1. I have documented this in a book, Genesis and Evolution, available on Amazon or a free PDF is available on the Peaceful Science website. I have found this to much more consistent with the rest of the Bible, a quick example is that the conflict with the creation sequence of Genesis 1 and the creation of Adam and the Garden immediately goes away. I have found no indication in scripture than the Garden creation was a local event.

I also go into detail in the book as to what is science and what is non-science. Science is executed using the scientific method, with data and conclusions being published in peer reviewed journals. The data behind the theory of evolution is staggering and it is about to explode as now you do not need a fossil to extract dan samples, they can be extracted from the dirt if there is confidence some had been there. I also go into detail on the dating methods in use, over 40 and how multiple dating methods are used to confirm data from each other.

I loved Dr.Collins books and I would recommend reading them, however the idea that Adam and Eve were “representative” I have found troubling. I believe as the Bible states Adam and Eve were directly created by God. Paul writings are very clear in that through one man sin and (spiritual) death has entered the world and through on man we have (spiritual) life.

I hope you have found the replies on this sight helpful, there are clearly a diversity of opinions which is what you need in a forum.

Tell your friends!

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I am quite sure it is not satisfactory. Though I would say “go against what I can see and measure…”

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I could be wrong, but free will does not necessarily mean original thought. I do not think that God had to create history. Where did that thought come from? Does history have anything to do with the act of creation? I think the biggest problem is trying to get an exact history, either through science or through the Biblical account.

The EC claim there was no Flood to get their historical evidence to work. The YEC group claim the Flood changed the dynamics. I do not think the claim, “there is no evidence of a Flood” is totally being honest. For one thing, floods are evidence of how we get fossil fuel to begin with.

To the literal fact that there is millions of years of history that need to be accounted for. As it stands the earth is no older than 4 billion+/- years old. So any dating done will be consistent if at creation the earth had that 4 billion age attribute. The current cosmology states the moon formed at a later date, but is also roughly the same age but was the result of a solar system event. This event would be history. From other ancient accounts it would indicate God did NOT create the arrangement of the earth and moon with this historic view. In fact the indication is that humans actually witnessed and lived through this event. In ANE text, the sun and moon were third and fourth generational phenomenon. So for a period of time in actual human history the sun and moon were not even prominent factors for those living on the earth. One point of History the Genesis account totally leaves out. The formation of the current state of the moon and earth and the spatial relationship both currently have with the sun. All Genesis says is that there are planetary objects created for the purpose of seasons, but not that such season were implemented at that point in history. Now even the Hebrews thought that there were 14 generations between Adam and Noah. I do not think that any one has recently taken into the account that at the time of the Flood, even the spatial relationship to the sun changed. This would seem to me a change in the actual measurement of time in regards to resolving the “history” the Bible seems to not account for.

We do have God claiming there would be a life expectancy change, which would not make sense unless there had been a Flood and a shift in the current lineup of planets. Another thing to take into account is the point that the current position does not bode well for the gigantic fossils found who seemed to have lived quite comfortably before the Flood. To me the miracle would be how could such a variety of life noted in the fossil record even exist if there was never a Flood and such a drastic change in the earth’s eco system. Now we would make the claim there have been many of these life changing events that the evidence proves and yet there seems to be a need to toss out the one that humans actually recorded.

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Boy! You have that a little backwards. The objective evidence works just fine by itself. There was no earth-wide flood. It just didn’t happen. Thus the question is whether we throw the Bible in the garbage can or we realize that people at the time had nothing like our conception of the world as a planet. Why should “the world” mean anything more than the Tigris and Euphrates rivers?

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Tim, I must say that I have no idea where your information is coming from, but it is so contrary to observed reality as I know it that I have difficulty understanding what you are talking about. While I doubt we will ever agree about any of this, would you please site the basis of your assertions, just to satisfy my curiosity?

First of I wish to say that one can still be a faithful Christian while also still accepting evolution as a means that God made the universe. Many early church theologians and fathers took a non-literal view of Genesis while other did but not from the YEC point of view which is a mid-19th century creation.

So what about the creation account of Genesis 2 then? If you read and compare Genesis 1 and 2 you will see that we have two different creation accounts. One with the earth starting off as a watery chaos as typical in a lot of ANE creation stories and Gen. 2 with the a barren, dry and dead earth. I have asked YECers to answer me on this and so far they have not, which bums me cause I want to see what their response would be. Anyway, if you can respond to if we are to take the creation account in Genesis literally then which one? Gen. 1 or Gen. 2? Thanks

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Real scholars understand that Genesis 1 (which really ends at 2:3) is the summary outline of creation, while Genesis 2 focuses on the creation of man and explains it in more detail. This recapitulation was typical for narratives of the Ancient Near East. As explained by Gleason Archer (1916–2004), Professor of Old Testament and Semitics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois:

[The] technique of recapitulation was widely practiced in ancient Semitic literature. The author would first introduce his account with a short statement summarizing the whole transaction, and then he would follow it up with a more detailed and circumstantial account when dealing with matters of special importance. [Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction , p. 118, 1964.]

Differences between Genesis 1 and 2?

OK you have now had a YEC answer you on this.

@jpm

By reading and re-reading several ANE accounts including the Enuma Elish and the Ugarit account.

@aarceng
I would like to clearify that before light there was no water. The abyss and deep are referring to space. Water is represented by the third part of the first triune god. God being nothingness, then earth, then water. But before there was earth and water the Word spoke into existence motion via the comand for there to be light. Without form and void means the earth had no form. It was not even round or flat. It was just matter without form. Water has form, so there was no water either.

@mitchellmckain

If you dig down under almost every land mass there is plenty of fossil fuel. It takes water to lift and move the land above these deposits. Can you prove that there are no fossil fuels under ground?