That is incorrect, death for humans in terms of relationship with God died, if that was so then why didn’t God kill Adam and Eve when they ate of the fruit? Also death seems to be already present since it doesn’t mention the death of all things asides from humans. Thus the YEC doctrine of “sin brought out death” is an out right bogus fraud which is outside from the Bible.
While not metaphorical it is heavily embellished and exaggerated and is heavily biased with both ANE stereotypes and pro-Hebrew bias as well along with a more theological teaching rather then a solid history lesson. Of course I’m referring to the OT rather then the NT which has more historical basis then the OT. Joshua for example present as of the Hebrews had wiped out the native Canaanites while in Judges it shows that they failed. The issue for Joshua is that it was more of a theological teaching that with Yahweh anything is possible and can be beaten. Judges shows that trust disappearing and the cycle of apostasy and reform. Not a lot of the Old Testament (mainly Genesis 1-11) is to be taken as solid history as we do with the New Testament.
Why should this be? Just because Jesus spoke in metaphors, it doesn’t follow that He was a metaphor Himself as well. Or should we also claim that Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Burns and Picasso were metaphors too?
Have you ever heard of the RATE project? It was an eight-year, $1.25 million research project run by the young-earth creationist organisations in an attempt to attack radiometric dating. It was the most comprehensive, extensive, expensive and thorough study that they’ve ever conducted. Yet they ended up admitting that squeezing the radiometric evidence for the age of the Earth into a 6,000 year timescale would have raised the temperature of the Earth’s crust to 22,000°C.
I’m sorry, but when the crown jewels of young-earth scientific research end up making that kind of admission, the claim that a young earth has so much as a shred of “science” or “evidence” to back it up is quite simply out of touch with reality.
And no, I don’t view an ancient earth as a danger to the Christian faith, because I do not consider the age of the earth to have any bearing whatsoever on the truth of the Resurrection. On the other hand, nonsensical and easily falsified claims, coupled with a refusal to respect the basic rules and principles of mathematics and measurement, undermines your credibility. And if you’re tying such bad practices to the integrity of the Bible, you’re not upholding the Bible; you’re undermining it.
I’m sorry, but that is simply not true.
Young-earth organisations routinely exaggerate the extent and significance of bad dates out of all proportion. There are tens of thousands of radiometric results published in the scientific literature every year. They are routinely dated by multiple independent methods, which are then cross-checked against each other. 95% of the time they are found to agree with each other to within error bars. Most of the other 5% of the time, the reasons for the discrepancies are well understood and totally unsurprising. Yet the young-earth organisations make a song and a dance about the 5% of discrepancies as if they were the rule, not the exception. That is simply not honest.
In any case, even if radiometric dating really were as unreliable as they make it out to be, this still falls far, far, far, far, far, far short of demonstrating that the ages could all fit into six thousand years. The RATE project’s 22,000°C heat problem should be sufficient to see that.
One other thing: “evolutionists” do not study the age of the earth. They study biological evolution. Geochronologists study the age of the earth. And they do not base their conclusions on evolution. They base it on measurement.
As for the “200 million year old” “fossilised” cowboy’s foot, I’m sorry but it was a fake.
This analogy is not valid. It’s not like comparing two books on the basis of having the same line spacing at all: it is like comparing two books on the basis of having the same words, paragraphs, sentences, and chapters over large portions of their text.
I’m sorry, but that is just nonsense. There is such a thing as objective evidence. Fossils exist. Zircon crystals containing significant amounts of lead exist. They have directly measurable properties.
And even though there are interpretations involved, you can’t just cry “interpretation” as if it were some kind of magic shibboleth to let you get past anything that you don’t like. There are rules that interpretations of the evidence have to follow. Rules that come straight from the Bible itself. Rules of mathematics, measurement, technical rigour, factual accuracy and basic honesty. And I’m sorry to say it, but young-earth arguments simply do not play by those rules.
Metaphor is a feature of human cognition and communication. How would Jesus’ life be a metaphor? There are clear extra-biblical references to Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure. Only kooky Jesus mythicists deny that the Gospels were based on the life and teaching of a historical figure. No such corroborating historical account exists for Adam or Noah or Jonah, so it makes sense to wonder if the literary genre of the accounts of their lives and actions are intended to be read as objective historical accounts, or as narratives whose primary intent is communicating theological truth.
So you are holding to the belief that tigers were created herbivores by God and somehow magically “sin” made them into carnivores?
The metaphor there is childbirth. The labor pains, groans, and travail of childbirth bring about life. The pain is redemptive and part of the ongoing process of regeneration. So are the “painful” natural cycles. The earth cannot flourish and regenerate without death. We had an interesting discussion with @jasonbourne4 bout this on this thread, which was linked to a nice essay about what the groaning of creation entailed. I think BioLogos is going to do a series of articles soon on this topic of the redemption of creation, so stay tuned.
I think if you took a year to seriously investigate the evidence, and did not rely on YEC resources to tell you what scientists say about evolution and an ancient earth, you would find this position hard to hold forever. It was evidence for evolution and lack of evidence for a young earth and a global flood that convinced most people on this site to change their mind. Many of us did not start out life accepting the evolutionary model or believing the earth was old.
Why do you think it is logical to compare manuscripts which must be produced by humans to living organisms that reproduce and pass on genetic information to their offspring. It is ridiculous because the analogy doesn’t work at any level.
Why do you posit this? Would it have broken all the laws of nature? How can rocks that can be dated by isotopes to millions of years of age be eradicated evidence?
Well, you could say the whole narrative meant to teach a theological lesson, not a historical one. It doesn’t have anything to do with metaphor.
I don’t think you understand what “metaphorical” means. It isn’t the opposite of historical. It doesn’t mean fiction. It means describing or understanding one thing in terms of another. The iron curtain and the cold war are metaphors used to describe and understand history. God describing Israel in terms of an adulturous wife is describing and understanding Israel’s idol worship and dependence on military alliances with foreign nations that eventually led to their historical exile. It doesn’t become fiction because the history and politics is described in metaphorical terms of marriage and adultery.
You really need to stop trusting creationist propaganda to give you accurate scientific information. If you sincerely investigated radiometric dating, you would see how dishonest these creationist “facts” are.
Do you believe things can be accurately measured? If I measure something as four feet, two inches is any interpretation involved? If I count 92 rings on a tree and can repeatedly observe that one ring grows a year (i.e. it is a standardized measurement), is it an interpretation to say the tree is 92 years old?
The dating methods are getting more precise. I think the issue is that if you have to have 10’s of thousands of samples to get your result, you are overlooking the probability of how precise you still need to be, to prove your point. If one sample does not prove your point you are back to the thought process of polytheism instead of monotheism. Even the wiki article on dating points out there are only a few spots scattered around the Globe where you can get a 4+ billion year age. Thus proving that at one time allegedly the earth was here 4+ billion years ago. It was not around 13 billion years ago. That fits perfect with all ANE accounts except Genesis. It states that matter in the form of “water” was around called earth before the big bang. God would have to give this matter an age of 4 billion years, while in the next step give the rest of the universe an age of 13 billion years to make Genesis fit what we observe. So either God does not understand science, or God does not know what the first verses of Genesis would even mean. They do not fit in to any other ANE account as the other accounts correctly describe the solar system as being part of the greater milky way after a non-descript period of time.
The other part of the dating process is carbon dating does not work past 10,000 years and radiometric dating really is for ages in the millions of years. However a Flood or event described in Genesis would allow for precise Carbon dating and would interfere with radiometric dating.
The biggest hurdle is ice cores. Unless before the Flood and during the Flood, muliple layers do not match up like they would if things have remained constant for millions of years. Also the Hymalayas which are the tallest current Mountains are also dated the youngest. It is probable they were formed after the Flood even if they give an age of millions of years. The point is they do not overall have an age of billions of years meaning that nothing ever happened cataclysmically to them giving them the youngest age. If they actually happened because of the Flood, they were probably not that tall to begin with. As a point in fact, there really did not need to be any tall mountains before the Flood. There was no cataclysmic event between creation and the Flood. There was no interruption in the human or animal generational account. What we want to do to get Genesis to fit is to add or change the format to fit other ANE accounts so it lines up with the scientific evidence as we interpret it. This is done in lieu of the fact that God knew exactly what happened and gave us enough information so we would know it was different than all other ANE accounts. We also have to erase from memory and get people to stop accepting the Flood. We have to change it from memory to just a belief. We basically have to pick and choose metaphors that line up with the data. Of course God could have replaced life on earth thousands of times over billions of years. From the account, all those other times seemed to have been incorporated into one singularity called the Flood. Or God justly gave the earth and universe a chosen Age. Is justice given to prove someone is in the right, or to right a wrong? In the age of personal rights, it gets confusing on what justice actually is. God is capable of choosing specific justice, and blindly handing out justice on a broader scale. The question about justice and death in Genesis: Of course Adam and Eve did not die. That was the lie of our adversary to prove his rights. The “death” was not complete until the Flood. That was the justice that God gave to earth for Adam’s sin. Humans are being justly preserved in a lost state, on the merit of each personal decision until the current existence is completed. The fact of science is that the world will be swallowed up into a lake of fire known as a dying sun. God’s mercy is we are not supposed to wait for millions or billions of years for that to happen. Why would God make the earth groan for billions of years of birth pains, when God clearly pointed out that birth was simple without pain, until Adam sinned? The act of creation was simple, complete, mature, without a prolonged period of creation.
So all the corroborating evidence for the Chicxulub asteroid? Never happened?
I hope people realize all these long posts where you assert these concordist views about Genesis and history or what ANE people thought are just your imaginative opinions. You aren’t bringing in scholarship or facts.
What? Do you know how measurements are made on things? Here’s an example of taking measurements of the K-T boundary done by multiple independent labs from samples all over:
Indeed. The Earth is a dynamic planet and what you measure is the age since the rock last melted.
@Timtofly. Nobody thinks the Earth was made 13 billion years ago. That would be the measured age of the universe.
That would be God created with the appearance of age and a false history. If that’s your position, fine, but don’t misunderstand or misrepresent actual measurements.
Past 30-50,000 years depending on what you are dating and in what condition the sample has been in.
Wrong. You can radiometrically date Hezekiah’s tunnels for example which are just a few thousand years old.
Wrong again. What does this even mean? You should be greatly concerned that when we carbon date fossils, ALL fossils don’t give absolute ages between 3,000-6,000 years ago. So carbon dating falsifies your model as well.
Yeah, ice cores also falsify a global flood.
What? Do you know about plate tectonics? You might like this short essay and learn some actual science:
That seems to be how you read the book of Nature. Pick and choose random ideas, match them together in random ways, and then talk about how it doesn’t add up to your interpretation of the book of Genesis.
All of my experience with evolutionary evidence says that it would take a god who would be the world’s worst liar in order to create a world where overwhelming evidence from multiple independent scientific fields using completely different measures tested over 150+ years all dovetail to show a very precisely coordinated ancient history of the universe, when what he actually did was create the whole universe 6,000 years ago. This overwhelming evidence includes data not only from radiometric dating but also plate tectonics, the geographic distribution of the fossil record (biogeography), DNA evidence (genomics), various astronomical measures (cosmic background radiation, red and blue shifts, etc.), ice cores, tree rings, and on and on.
Please note that I used the lower-case “g” because I am most definitely not talking about the real God.
I think you meant to say that it could not be further from the truth. Instead, you inadvertently spoke truly in saying that “the notion that young earth creationism has no science to back it up must be close to the truth.”
I also agree with much (but not all) of what @mitchellmckain and @christy have said in response to your post.
Indeed, that is the most irrefutable aspect of science. So much evidence from so many different angles allows for increasingly precise calculations. That makes it impossible for its conclusions to be simply mistaken and shows that there is a reality which it is all pointing to. This leaves only two options open to us: either that reality is exactly what it science discovers, or the reality is a conspiracy so vast it must be God Himself seeking to deceive us. So to be sure, science is not without faith. At the very least there is the faith that there is no such enormous supernatural deception. We believe that either God is rational, honest and well meaning or there is no god at all.
You’ve completely missed the point here Tim. The tens of thousands of samples aren’t about the age of the earth being difficult to pin down; they are about the scientific principle of reproducibility. And reproducibility has nothing whatsoever to do with polythesim. On the contrary, it stems from the Biblical principle that every matter should be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
In any case, if you could prove a point with just one sample, you would also be granting a free pass to astrology, homeopathy, feng shui, water divining, indigo children, the Loch Ness Monster, ancient aliens, reading tea leaves, and claims by tobacco companies that smoking is good for you.
That would be the difference between theory and practice. Practice being the actual outcome predicted. On (going forward) an agreement between two or more witnesses fulfills the demand for authentication. When you are trying to recreate the past to unwittingly or purposely refute the being known as God why would you reference the principle set in place by God to refute God?
I agree that the rule to stone a false prophet (prediction) and the authority of two or three witnesses may have laid the ground work for the scientific method. I accept that regardless of the modern notion science and the church has always been at odds with one another.
If my refutation fails to point out the difference between interpretation and reality that is on me.
Deception has been the first excuse in the book since Adam claimed Eve deceived him. Did Eve decieve him is the million dollar question. I have no excuse for not noting and checking the up to date ability for humans to figure out they were alledgedly lied to about the history of the earth they live on. I do not think that creating a mature universe is an act of deception purposely in regards to the current time in history when faith in God would be at it’s lowest point.
So either the first chapter of Genesis is not the Word of God. God is outright lying and it is God’s Word. Or the third option there are so many gaps that the text should not make sense at all.
It also can be interpreted in as many ways as each person who reads it. Obviously whenever any particular set of humans think they have a handle on it, another set comes along with a totally different take. But to think that the truth lies in the authority and security of current scientific thought processes, does not seem particularly wise. Each person has to decide on their own volition.
As for dating methods I failed in pointing out their short comings as built into the nature of the methods themselves. I guess that was taken as being my own opinions as opposed to my inability to accurately convince anyone. It is easier to just remove the Flood as an obstacle and accuse me of coming up with my refutation as a personal opinion. I would assume most posters post their opinions, and unlike me misunderstand common knowledge and twist it to make a point. I do not claim to be an authority and the purveyor of some unknown truth to solve all the contradictions inherent in reconciling history.
If the readers do see that Genesis 1 is the actual beginning would be in contrast to Genesis just happening billions of years later, which way should it be interpreted, accepted, or at least believed?
That would be indicated in all ANE text as the very first primordial ocean, and would be an acceptable substitute for God and not offend any one’s senses of reality.
There is the point where no Scripture is of private interpretation unless of course there is only one person left who accepts God and God’s Word without any interpretation at all. The point being humans on their own have to choose between what the Bible is saying, even if it goes against our senses. I realize that the Bible has been subjected to criticism and broken down word by word and sifted through the scientific method. We cannot change the past. If studying the past changes the Bible, where does that leave us?
Tim, I’m not trying to refute God. The fact that the earth is billions of years old does not mean that God does not exist. Nor does it mean that Genesis 1 is wrong. It just means that you’ve misunderstood it.
Actually, nobody reads Genesis 1 without any interpretation at all. Even Answers in Genesis interprets it when discussing, for example, where the light came from in the three days before the sun and the moon were created, or what the “expanse” in the sky was in Genesis 1:6.
The fact is that Genesis 1 leaves room for multiple interpretations on the age of the earth. Physical evidence from radiometric dating and other techniques, on the other hand, does not.
No, it’s simply that you’re demonstrating a lack of understanding of how they actually work. I’d suggest you read up on the subject first. Start here – this article was written by a Christian who works professionally in the field:
Don’t just skim it. Read it carefully. Make sure you have correctly understood the key points he makes and why he makes them. Because until you actually understand what scientists do in reality, you are simply not in a position to be able to respond to them coherently.
lol. I like your analogies, but I don’t agree. God creates and I don’t really see the difference. God pretty much had to speak light into existence and everything until man as there was no “dirt” to make any living things from. I get that there are people these days that are trying to consolidate Darwinian evolution with the Bible and the Christian doctrine. This is very dangerous. But laying that all aside the theory itself is according to some molecular biologist not only false, but it is isn’t even a valid scientific theory. Have you researched any of the scientists that do not think Darwinian evolution is impossible?
I am also aware that in the original language the bible is not talking about a lite4ral 6 24 hour periods. But I think you will find that the so-called “theory” will soon byte tha dust and more and more scientist are coming forward these days agree that it will.
I disagree and think it is dangerous. Genesis states that all living things were created from a “common material” which is supported by DNA evidence. All that aside, the theory of Darwinian evolution will (imo and that of many molecular biologists) go down in history as one of the biggest jokes ever played on humans. I suggest researching some of these biologists that can explain wht Darwinian evolution is not only a valid scientific theory, it isn’t even science. It is a philosophy. Jesus says that we can 'speak to" a mountain and it will “obey us”, so where do you draw the line when you start cherry picking scripture and labeling some literal and some not, other that parables that are meant to be allegorical, and the prose which are as well (like Psalms) ?
I also suggest this video from David Berlinski for a short n sweet answer to why Darwinian evolution is not science. https://youtu.be/dIOIlCQDNgg
Not all molecular biologist agree with you. In fact, some are saying it isn’t even science, it is a philosophy. Also, the fossil record is agreeably the biggest problem with the so-called “theory”, there are no actual transitional fossils. I do not wish to debate evolution other than to suggest researching the Scientist that do not agree that it is a valid theory, and according to them is has absolutely zero evidence supporting it and I agree. All the evidence is anecdotal. Also, the bible does not give an age for the earth nor does it infer one, and in the original text, the “days” in creation were not literal 24 hour periods. YEC is just an assumption.
Yes. This “explanation” requires faith. All of the evidence for evolution requires faith and it has never been observed. There are absolutely no actual transitional fossils that are “;in between species”…none…not one.
