Your adamant comments have all the music of a zealot’s intractability. How could you possibly be so sure?
Because the bible tells me so.
Do you agree that God sometimes uses evaporation to make it rain? I would hope so.
How is that germane? Evaporation does not taint the character and nature of God, nor does it cause someone to question the truth of the gospel in Genesis.
So how is it that you can only imagine God making humans with a >POOF<, and would never ever use genetics to intercede at one time or another?
I can easily see genetics in creation i.e. the forming of Eve from Adam’s rib. What I do not see in creation is evolution.
If God would leave all this Geological information to show us how old the Earth is (which you have to admit is odd to say the least, right?), then don’t you think it’s premature to conclude that God would never use genetics and natural selection to work his miraculous ways?
Geological information does not reveal to us an old earth. People’s beginning presuppositional bias that the earth is old reveals to us an old earth. Again, I see nothing of natural selection being mentioned in scripture; not a whiff, not even a hint. But I see evidence of supernatural special creation in scripture. I can only go where scripture takes me pertaining to creation. You want to convince me otherwise, then show me evidence of natural selection in scripture.
The first men to conclude the Earth was much older than 6,000 years were devout Christian geologists. They had no such presupposition… and no doubt they were hoping they were very wrong in their discoveries. But more discoveries piled up onto earlier discoveries.
There is nothing in the Bible about stars being giant balls of burning gas; in fact the bible suggests that “falling stars” can hit the earth, being the approximate size of a horse or maybe a horsecart.
Do you reject the existence of stars as gigantic burning balls of gas?
There is also nothing in the Bible about using radioactive rocks to power heat and power cities.
Do you consider atomic power to be imaginary?
There is nothing in the Bible about microbes causing disease. In fact, the Bible talks about demons causing disease, and prayer and righteousness as cures to disease… and never even mentions measles, which so contagious that someone with measles can sit in a room for 30 minutes … and then leave the room. And anyone entering the room for the next several hours are at risk of catching the disease just by breathing the air.
Do you consider measles to be an imaginary ailment?
The theory of evolution brought about the new finding that the age of the earth was older, because evolution needed the earth to be billion of years old to be a viable concept. It had little to do with evidence and more so to do with presupposition, the presupposition that evolution was true.
There is nothing in the Bible about stars being giant balls of burning gas; in fact the bible suggests that “falling stars” can hit the earth, being the approximate size of a horse or maybe a horsecart.
Do you reject the existence of stars as gigantic burning balls of gas?
I do not see how that is germane. There is much evidence in scripture of God speaking everything in creation into existence; in an instant out of nothingness
There is also nothing in the Bible about using radioactive rocks to power heat and power cities.
Do you consider atomic power to be imaginary?
Again, I do not see how that is germane. There is much evidence in scripture of God speaking everything in creation into existence; in an instant out of nothingness. That does not even remotely sound like evolution
It is my opinion that the two creation stories in Genesis are sequential and the second creation story is not a further clarification, but a distinct and separate event, which would be consistent the the MRCA data. I feel this is more consistent with the rest of scripture for three reasons:
The sequence of creation in the second story (earth, sun, moon and stars already created, then man, then the plants and animals, contradicts the first creation story.
In Genesis (and in Chronicles), the line leading to Jesus is always given first, always with one exception, which is that of Adam. I believe the first creation story fulfills the purpose of providing the line of men and women not leading to Christ.
In Genesis 6, we are told of the “sons of God” (descendants of Adam) and the “daughters of man” (descendants of the first creation) and how it was very important that Noah was “pure in his generations” meaning he maintains the integrity of the line leading to Christ.
With this approach, scripture can be viewed as accurate while eliminating any perceived conflict with evolution.
The Theory of Evolution came after the findings of Geologists suggested that the earth was much older than 6,000 years.
Google this sentence: "Geologists were just beginning to gather evidence for a much older Earth, and this knowledge had a great influence on Darwin, who took Charles Lyell’s classic Principles of Geology with him on the voyage "
Do you think God literally spoke? In the silence of a cosmic vacuum? Does he have a mouth, with lips and a tongue? Can he also make a square triangle, or a round square?
Evolution cannot begin without anything. God created the universe. In parts of the Universe he used Evolution to accomplish his ends, just like he uses evaporation to accomplish his goals for rain.
This is not factual. Geological evidence of an ancient earth predated Darwin’s book by a hundred years or so. How can you claim to follow Jesus who was filled with truth and yet so confidently speak a falsehood? As someone who is not Christian, I am dismayed to see such carelessness with truth by someone who supposedly follows it.
This is not accurate, but some facts underlie it. The Earth was understood to be much older than a few thousand years well before Darwin, since the mid- to late 18th century. How much older? Certainly not billions of years, more like several million years. This was based substantially on evidence from rock layers: it was clear that massively thick layers had been laid down long before the appearance of the larger animals that were fossilized in the upper parts of the Earth’s crust. For an illustration of this idea, see the lead image and its caption here: https://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/the-religion-of-geology-edward-hitchcock-on-natural-theology
When Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, he probably did envision a time span of the order of a billion years or so for the whole history of life on Earth. However, he offered just one specific number in the first edition: 300 million years to erode the chalky region of SW England. The physical scientists (physicists and geologists), however, found that number far too large based on the evidence and knowledge then available. They wanted a number in the tens to hundreds of millions instead. Darwin wasn’t able to answer them convincingly at the time, though once radioactivity had been discovered (after his death), the situation changed in his favor. For some of the details, see Darwin’s Critics: Then and Now - BioLogos.
Radioactivity led scientists to adjust the age of the Earth vastly upward, from the roughly 100 million years that was widely believed around 1900 to several billions now. It did this in three main ways. First, studies of the rates of radioactive decay led to the development of multiple ways to estimate the ages of rocks by the isotopes they contain. Second, it led to the realization that there is a powerful, ongoing source of heat in the Earth’s interior, namely, radioactive decay of uranium and some other elements. That nullified the assumptions of Darwin’s critics, who based their numbers partly on the idea that the Earth was still cooling down from an originally hot, molten state. Third, studies of nuclear fusion and stellar interiors in the mid- to late 20th century led to the understanding that the Sun is an ordinary main sequence star, about half way through its anticipated lifetime of 10 billion years. This is highly consistent with the Earth’s age, giving coherence to the larger picture. Darwin knew none of this, of course.