Old Earth vs. Young Earth

“Subjective nuances” are only involved when you try to do eisegesis, as exemplified in the extreme by YEC.
I don’t care about geology when it comes to the text.

Neither do I, but the loudest voices here forever insist, on filtering reality through dead words, so we must engage in dubious battle, in the hope that a single unknown lurking brilliant mid-west teenager struggling like Dembski (qv), can see that faith and science are utterly separate magisteria.

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If faith and science were separate magisteria, that would imply that “neoatheism” is wrong to say that science disproves faith. From a Christian perspective, science is a submagisterium of faith - it is the faith-based approach to understanding the physical workings of creation. That does not excuse misrepresenting science in claimed support of faith, but rather is a call to do good quality science as a way of honoring God and serving others. Of course, a clear and consistent definition of faith is needed. A popular bad neoatheist argument is to claim that faith and reason are opposites, therefore anything that they label as faith is unreasonable. A more reasonable definition of faith is putting trust in something. Such trust may be reasonable or unreasonable. Whether or not someone has good reason for a particular instance of faith does not automatically match whether the object of that faith is actually trustworthy. But the “magesteria” categorization uses faith more in the sense of “the faith” -a collective set of beliefs such as a particular religious or atheistic ststem. Reason itself requires faith in the reliability of reasoning and in the accuracy of the premises used.

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