The only other option is adopting “alternative facts”. 
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There is a very good reason why cautions “not to make our science and discoveries into idols” don’t go down well with scientifically educated Christians.
Such a caution would be a good and important point if it were a warning not to spend so much time in the lab that we end up neglecting our churches, our prayer lives, our families, or our health. Unfortunately this is rarely if ever the case. Usually, when people tell us “not to make our science and discoveries into idols,” they are doing so in the service of promoting scientific falsehood and misinformation, or wilful ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In such cases, rustled feathers, offence and a sharp rebuke are only to be expected, and do not qualify as “persecution or opposition for being a Christian.”
The issue at stake in these discussions is making sure that your facts are straight. The reason why many young Christians stumble over evolution is not because of what the theory of evolution itself says, but because they learned that their church leaders were teaching them falsehood and misinformation about it.
Those of us who, as Christians, take science as seriously as we do, have very good reasons for doing so. Some of us have to understand science correctly in order to do our jobs. Some of us have suffered damage to our careers as a result of not taking science seriously. Some of us have seen our loved ones come to harm as a result of not taking science seriously. Many of us are aware of situations where getting science wrong has resulted in companies going out of business or people getting killed.
We are aware that science has rules, and that it requires rigorous standards of disciplined thinking and quality control. When we insist that the rules be followed and professional standards be maintained, which is basically all that we are doing when we respond to young earthism and evolution denial, accusations of “making our science and discoveries into idols” are basically a demand that we lower our standards to levels that quite rightly would not be tolerated in any science-based workplace.
This comment is untrue. Science does not change arbitrarily like shifting sands, nor is it driven by “current scientific fashions.” On the contrary, it only changes in disciplined, rigorous and carefully controlled ways and only when required by new evidence or new and improved techniques for analysing the evidence. To portray scientific knowledge as “shifting sands” is to express an ignorance of how science works, what scientists actually do, and what you need to do in order to challenge it.
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Or for that matter changes in inclination of coastal strata in response to cyclical earthquakes.
A friend working on his master’s in geology spent several summers in various kinds of boats examining coastal deposits along the central to northern Oregon coast. A regular occurrence was tilted deposits of strata that began as sediments that would have been deposited in level layers. Mapping these out, he showed how a great deal of the Oregon coast is made of huge blocks of rock (miles in extent) that after the fault offshore settle down to level, then over time as tension builds tilt as the blocks tilt. Due to the repetitive nature of these earthquakes (which can be as powerful as an 8.9) he could count backwards, and thanks to several stretches of coastline where numerous such strata are exposed he counted roughly twenty of these events, with an average separation in time of about six hundred years. Do the math: six hundred times twenty is twelve thousand years, so this one phenomenon on the Oregon coast blows YEC out of the water – there is no alternate explanation because the layers include organic-rich material that could only be deposited on a forest floor, buried in turn in gravel deposits and/or sand, then returning to forest floor, which means that the land in location where these were found rose above sea level and later dropped below, repeatedly.
Another thing he found that tells of the tiling of the land was buried tree stumps that were buried at an angle: different species of trees grow in specific ways so it’s possible to tell if the tree grew on the level or on a slope.
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Yes – and that’s why I can’t conclude that YEC is wrong: they treat the text as though it was written by someone’s great-grandfather in a journal of observations, and in English. But it’s ancient literature in an ancient language with ancient literary genres within ancient worldviews.
They in essence demand that God have inspired ancient writers to use a modern scientific materialist worldview, thus making the accounts basically incomprehensible to the original audiences, and by so doing they actually throw away the main message of various accounts.
I had no trouble with the ages of various formations in geology class because I’d already seen in the Hebrew text that there is no way to calculate the age of the Earth from the Old Testament.
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No one here does that.
Quite so.
I do conservation work in coastal dunes. One way we eliminate one aggressive invasive species is to dump sea water on them.
Historically that’s obvious: YEC emerged after scientific materialism became the modern western worldview.
And earthquakes.
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This has become obvious to nearly everyone outside of YEC. They attempt to refute this in a gambit to establish a “philosophical lineage” to get back to Christ at least. Their strategy for this is to point out that the apostles and Jesus himself didn’t believe in any history stretching back more than the few thousands of years, so therefore Jesus & Co must have all been YEC. Or so their logic runs. But this is like a modern Luddite claiming that Jesus and Paul were also Luddites. Because none of them ever consented to own a computer or even so much as a calculator. So … naturally … Jesus was a Luddite, right? And the spirit of ‘Ludditism’ has as much claim to support by including Christ in its fold as YECism does.
[Actually … the ‘Ludditism’ appeal would carry even more weight than YEC because, unlike YEC, at least Ludditism wouldn’t be forced to distort and re-interpret scriptures and reject so many of the ancient ways of understanding sacred writ the way YECism is forced to do.]
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This is a false comparison. Our understanding of the natural world changes, so does our understanding of Scripture.
If we allow independent historical records, then we can get it to be >4,000 years (working backwards from the falls of Samaria and Jerusalem to Abraham living c. 1800 BC).
Love this stuff. Not a researcher, but I happen to live next to a mountain that’s a great example of sedimentary rock formation and the age of the earth.
Sandia Crest is a “fault block” mountain. When the Rio Grande Rift began to sink, pressure along the fault line boundaries caused the Sandia Mts to lift like a trap door on a hinge. The underlying granite plutons (bodies of cooled magma) fractured and pushed the sedimentary layers above it higher and higher. The top of Sandia Crest is a series of alternating deposits of sandstone, limestone and shale that reflect the area’s ancient transitions between shallow sea, shoreline and desert.
From my deck (Larry David would be crusading against that pole and wires!)
Sandia Crest (not my pic)
Here’s where it gets fun and YEC has zero explanatory power.
The layers at the top have fossilized brachiopods, crinoids, corals and bryozoans. All of these are small sea creatures but easy to spot in rocks along the hiking trails at the crest. The youngest of these layers dates to about 320 million years ago, when the supercontinent Pangea was still intact.
Now the fun starts. The Sandias are young mountains, formed between 5-10 million years ago. Why are the sedimentary rocks on top so much older than that? At least 300 million years of sediments are missing. Where did they go, if they ever existed at all?
The answer is pretty cool. Remember that the Sandias are a “fault block” mountain chain that lifted like a trap door on a hinge. Imagine a tall wedding cake with multiple layers of cake (limestone) alternating with slippery icing (sandstone and shale). Suppose the waiter cuts the entire cake in half and lifts it at an angle to take a picture for the internet. What happens next? The top half of the cake slides onto the floor and the TikTok goes viral.
That’s exactly what happened to Sandia Crest. Well, minus the TikTok. (Were you there?!) The top layers of sedimentary rocks from the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (with their accompanying fossils) slid down the slope and landed in a pile at the bottom of the mountain to the east.
Mystery solved!
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But that’s all we can do – beyond that it’s not even really history.
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Hebrew was a spoken language long before it was a written language. The earliest alphabetic scripts, as opposed to cuneiform or hieroglyphics, were the Proto-Sinaitic and the Ugaritic alphabets around 1500 BC. The oldest known inscription in Proto-Hebrew (Old Hebrew) dates around 1000 BC, which is roughly the beginning of the monarchy (David), court prophets (Samuel to Isaiah and beyond), and the permanent priesthood (first temple).
An interesting sidenote is that cuneiform was the international language of trade and diplomacy (mammon and empire) for several thousand years, even when the language itself was dead and no longer spoken. (Like Latin for medieval European scholars.) Alphabetic scripts were invented to write local business contracts, political propaganda and religious traditions. There’s a really interesting article about Babel buried in there that I’ll get around to writing one day.
Anyway, the bottom line for me is that the closer to 1000 BC the Hebrew Bible gets, the more “historically reliable” it gets. (Taking also into account that ancient authors had a different concept of history than we do.) Conservatively, Abraham lived 800 years before his story could be written down. How historically reliable should we consider those records, especially when it comes down to word-for-word records of conversations? Did God dictate Genesis 12- through Judges word-for-word?
Extrapolate from there.
Edit: A good source
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A final footnote just to say science doesn’t pretend to have solved every mystery. Between the granite core and the sedimentary rocks on top of Sandia Crest, a billion years of geological history from the Late Precambrian to the Middle Paleozoic are missing (the Great Unconformity).
What happened during that time, and what wiped the record? Who knows?
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Sounds like a theme some of my grad school professors talked about.
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Erosion happened during that time. Obviously there’s a lot of detail missing there, but elsewhere we do have rocks in that age range. Much of that is during the existence of the supercontinent Rodinia, which, being land, was generally eroding.
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The Bible as it was originally written has not changed. (And those scholars examining the underlying texts from which it is translated are able to a high degree of certainty to establish what was originally written.) So I can have full confidence in the unchanging nature of God’s Word.
I also have a biology textbook dating back to when I studied biology in high school. Much of what it teaches has been affirmed since then, but much of it has also been surpassed or modified or discarded and replaced and even repudiated.
So what I “learned” as evidences for evolution: peppered moths, embryonic recapitulation, the Nebraska and Piltdown man, the importance of Urey-Miller experiment, the drawings of ape to human evolution, Darwin’s finches, and even vestigial organs (despite objections to the contrary), are now known to not be valid evidences, and at times, even fraudulent.
So maybe you wouldn’t use the term “shifting sands” to describe the advance of scientific understanding, but the shoe still fits–so wear it rather than denying it.
Except that Dr. Whitmore examined both seashore sand and desert sand under the microscope and found evidence contrary to what you have stated. And in laboratory experiments, intact muscovite remained after a year tumbling in water, but was completely gone in days in wind.
So apparently wind in a dry environment is more destructive to muscovite than a water environment. I am not the one who did the study or who understands geology very well, so it would be foolish for me to engage in wrestling with someone who claims to know more.
But I doubt that your evidence would hold up well if you were engaging with those who did study these features. So in the end, you choose your authorities, and I choose mine, and we agree to disagree.
The shoe does not fit, so why should we lie about it, which is what you appear to be doing, or else the truth that comes from the reality of God’s creation that you have to deny just bounces off your canned response container.
Brandolini’s law states it takes ten times the effort to debunk rubbish as it takes to produce it.
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That explains why it’s been so difficult to debunk Brandolini’s law!
Actually no, because it takes an infinite amount of time to debunk the truth. Sorry. 