I’ve read Mary Schweitzer’s papers. She’s not stumped at all. In fact, they are making considerable headway in understanding how iron preserves some organic structures.
I don’t personally know Dr. Schweitzer but I have friends who do. She is under no “pressure”. She is a scientist so she certainly wants to understand how things work. But to say “she simply must explain this” doesn’t make sense to me. (You may know something my friends and I do not. I’m just saying what other paleontologists tell me who work in that field.)
What “vested interest” are you talking about?
Of course, it is the Young Earth Creationists who have the most to lose with “soft tissues” (a term that they usually misconstrue completely.) They HOPE that “soft tissues” in dinosaur fossils mean that dinosaurs were contemporaneous with people—but, in fact, they have the huge problem that ancient remains from mammoths (for example) have DNA fragments quite routinely, but these “soft tissues” from dinosaurs do not. That is a HUGE problem for YECs.
Based on your fallible interpretation of a fallible English translation of a text written by a people for which you have no conception of how they thought about what was written. Can you explain how it is you came up with what is described in Genesis and know for certain that it is correct?
I can only speak for myself—but I will say this: I am far less confident of the meaning of various passages in Genesis today than I was a half century ago. That’s probably because in the years since then I completed advanced degrees which forced me to deal with a lot of problems and complexities of which I was mostly ignorant as a young professor. It sounds like Otangelo has far more confidence in his abilities than I have in mine. I freely admit that.
I am very certain of this: The original audience which the author(s) of Genesis had in mind understood various aspects of the text which entirely escape my understanding. I also think that I understand a great deal more about creation than did those ancient Hebrews. I’m certain of that.
There are two new papers out on soft tissue. The first one is where Mary’s team repeated and greatly cleaned up her previous work. results are even more clear and precise. In the second paper, soft tissue may have been found going back 195 mya. If confirmed this will be spectacular
I read that first one but had only heard of that second paper. So I’m baffled as to what r_speir considers “not credible.”
What I have yet to see is a Young Earth Creationist critic of Dr. Schweitzer’s work address the problems of their “young” interpretation of the soft tissue finds and explain why “young” dinosaur finds do not contain DNA fragments.
I asked once in a different thread about how the T-rex fossils she based the original work on could be found under the iridium layer from the asteroid impact 65 million years ago if they were supposed to be evidence for dinosaurs living in the recent past. I don’t think I got an answer.
I wonder when someone here is going to get into discuss of feathered dinosaurs or birds being extant dinosaurs. I love the contortions YECs do on this area of rapid discovery. I am reading an article in March 2017 Scientific American on “The True Colors of Dinosaurs.” Really amazing discoveries and analysis.
So when he , and the apostle Paul talked about Adam and Eve, that was figurative, too ? they were not alking about real persons ? If so, how did sin enter the world ?
The problem is not iron only. The problem is radio carbon C14 dating, that gives a age of fossil bones less than 50th years. The problem is non permineralized fossils. And the problem is protein, beside hemoglobin, found in different fossils.
Carbon-14-dated dinosaur bones, non permineralized fossils, and soft tissue like proteins are evidence for young fossils
There are two ways to answer this. One way is to presume that Paul’s language was figurative as well, as allowed for by holy inspiration.
And there is the way I prefer, which is that Jesus while dressed in a mortal body didn’t know anything more about creation of the Earth than the people who lived around him. When Jesus was a child, did he already know carpentry? Or did he still have to learn some Earth-bound skills and experiences.
As for this standard phrase: “If so, how did sin enter the world?”, there are millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians who characterize Adam & Eve as the “first sinners”, not as the ones who “invented” Sin. Sin “entered the world” via mortal flesh. All come short of the glory of God.
If these things were not true, then Adam somehow “magically” tainted all their children with sin of which they are not personally guilty. But all mortal beings, by being mortal, will inevitably sin.
Jesus as God knew all the spiritual truths he needed to know. But how does this make him omniscient about the past? As a 5 year old, did he already know how to build a house?
Did Jesus know how to drive a car? Did Jesus know about “germ theory”? If he did, why didn’t he tell anyone?
Why did he spit into a handful of dirt and apply this “gook” to someone’s eyes?
Oh, really? Let’s look at the first words of Genesis 1:11 and how they connect to Animals being “brought forth” by the Earth [By God, Through The Earth!]. I’ve already posted some of this, but it’s worth mentioning it again.
“bringing forth” - - Applied to both Plants and Animals.
“by their seed” - - a clear reference to biological origins. Trees and animals did not, and were not, sprung out of boulders.
Genesis 1:25
“And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
Now this seems pretty straightforward, yes? God made these beasts. The “his” of “his kind” is the beast itself. The beast is being generically referred referring to “his” kind … his category of creature.
The English word “after” is probably not the best way to translate the sentence. Instead of “after”, it would be more clear to say "God made the beasts “by” or even “into” their kinds… their categories. He didn’t just create a chaos of beasts. He created creatures that could be categorized by their kinds.
And these “kinds” are pretty strongly connected to the reproductive process of these beasts. We see this in
Genesis 1:11-12:
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed,
and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself,
upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind,
and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind:
and God saw that it was good.”
I am thinking about one of the great riddles of Genesis: how is it that Cain feared the peoples of the earth?
“Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoevet finds me will kill me.”
Here is one possible solution to that riddle: Adam and Eve were not the first members of the homo sapiens species. Instead, they were the first people with whom God forged a covenant. Cain knew about the humans from whom Adam and Eve had been selected…and he feared them.
If you reject this solution, then you have to come up with one of your own. What is your solution, Otangelo?