The Fall of Historical Adam, (Federal Head of man), impacts all of humanity to need Christ's Salvation

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@Burrawang

There is little to be gained from continuing dialogue with you as no-one will be edified by your accusations, and thus I have decided this will be my last reply to you.

I’m sorry if you feel that way, and if you thought that my use of the “L” word was overly strong.

However, when someone has a PhD in geology, it is only right and proper to expect them to meet much higher standards of honesty and factual accuracy when teaching about their own areas of expertise. Untrue claims from non-experts can be excused on the grounds of ignorance or misunderstanding; experts do not have the luxury of that excuse. Additionally when someone is teaching in the Church, they are in a position of trust, and that gives them an additional duty of care to make sure that their facts are straight, because failing to do so is a breach of that trust. That is what James 3:1 is all about, is it not?

@Burrawang

I refute the blatant false accusation that you have made against a fine Christian man, Dr Andrew Snelling.

What evidence do you have that my “accusation” was “blatant false”?

I didn’t just state that Snelling’s assertion was wrong; I explained why it was wrong. If you want to refute my response, you need to bring some evidence to the table that contradicts my explanation. Merely dismissing it as a “blatant false accusation” doesn’t tell anyone anything.

@Burrawang

May our Lord and Saviour Jesus, bless you and give you insight about the truth.

And may our Lord and Saviour Jesus bless you too.

Incidentally, you may find it helpful to read the backstory of why I take the approach to science that I do. I will admit that I can get pretty touchy or even confrontational when I see bad arguments, scientific misinformation or bad attitudes towards science being promoted in a Church context—this is because I bought into a lot of that stuff myself when I was in my twenties, and only when I got into my thirties I found that those attitudes had done massive damage to my career prospects. A lot of the damage has since been repaired, and I think I’ve forgiven the people who egged me on into it (and I certainly need to forgive myself for actually getting into it in the first place), but it still strikes a bit of a raw nerve at times.

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@Burrawang

Incorrect, we DO find, blood vessels, DNA fragments, containing a few base pairs, various components of proteins and break down products from them that still exist in real unpermineralised dinosaur bone in harsh environments.

Have you actually read Mary Schweitzer’s original 2005 paper? She had to soak the samples in demineralising solution for a week to get at the stuff.

This must be some new meaning of the word “unpermineralised” of which I was not previously aware.

Look, we know what soft tissue looks like after a few thousand years. It looks like this:

Or like this:

That is the state of preservation that you would expect to find from dinosaur carcasses if they really were only a few thousand years old. We would have sequenced the entire T-Rex genome by now. Why haven’t we?

@Burrawang

Incorrect. Contamination has been accounted for and ruled out.
The C 14 is real, the only truthful explanation is that the diamonds are NOT hundreds of millions of years old!

There’s one simple reason why this isn’t true. The amount of carbon-14 in ancient samples varies widely.

Here are the graphs from the RATE project reports:

If the radiocarbon levels really were intrinsic rather than contamination, the amounts in the oldest samples would tightly cluster round some value significantly larger than the standard deviation and significantly larger than known, well studied and measured contamination vectors. A peak with a spread from, say, 2-2.5% might be something to write home about. A spread from 0-0.1 or 0.1-0.7 … not so much.

The levels would be the same for Precambrian coals as for Phanerozoic coals. The fact that Phanerozoic samples give about five times as much radiocarbon as Precambrian coals is fully accounted for by the fact that they have to undergo more complex sample preparation to extract cellulose from wood or collagen from bone. The extra processing steps introduce more contamination.

The levels would be the same for coals and diamonds. All diamonds would have very similar amounts of radiocarbon. This is not what we find in reality. The articles that you linked to are dismissive of the suggestion that carbon-14 could come from irradiation from nearby uranium, but the fact of the matter is that the correlation between nearby uranium and radiocarbon in diamonds is observable, testable, repeatable and measurable even by YEC standards of “observable, testable, repeatable and measurable.”

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

Contamination has been accounted for and ruled out.

@Jammycakes is correct, it’s contamination. It has not been accounted for and ruled out. The familiar creationist articles you reference are lying ( don’t like the word lie?, then don’t accuse others of it in your lead post ), about the calibration procedures, sample management, and sensitivity of AMS carbon dating. It is likely none of the authors have ever even seen an accelerator up close. No actual lab has ever found intrinsic C-14 in diamonds. There will always be a trace detection of C-14; it is rich in the air you breathe.

Despite what is stated in YEC literature, there is no evidence at all that diamonds contain any C-14. The half-truth which led to this full falsehood was essentially a legitimate calibration exercise, using diamond samples for AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry), designed not to find C-14, but to establish a technique to zero the instrument - in other words to find the point where signal is completely subsumed into noise.

This noise, mathematically, equated from 65,000 to 80,000 years of age, but this is just the sound of static; it does not demonstrate even a trace of C-14 in the sample. 50,000 years of age is widely regarded as the limit for carbon dating. The double minded response of YEC to carbon dating is that they dismiss dating signals as noise and embrace noise as signal.

[St.Roymond]

@Burrawang

It’s overwhelmingly clear through reading the Bible that death first came into the world as a consequence of the rebellion/sin

Except it isn’t – only human death, and not literal physical death or they would have died right then.

And that’s assuming that it’s fine to read the scriptures from a modern worldview.

@Burrawang

particularly the historical reading of Genesis

Why would you read Genesis as a type of literature that didn’t even exist yet?

@Burrawang

Obviously, at that point the Creation was perfect

That’s not in the text anywhere.

@Burrawang

It is clear that Jesus believed that Adam and Eve were real people

That’s arguable. All that can really be said from the Gospels is that Jesus recognized Genesis as authoritative.

@Burrawang

Of course, evolution is the major anti-God pretension of our age

But people come to Christ from studying evolution – there were a bunch in the informal intelligent design club when I was in university, atheists and agnostics who due to studying evolution concluded that there must be a Designer, then concluded the Designer must be a Creator, and then looked for where that Creator might have communicated with humans – and ended up as Christians.

And reading Genesis was one reason most of them accepted that the Bible was actual communication from the Creator because it fits with evolution.

Since studying evolution has brought people to Christ, how can it be called “anti-God”? When I was in university, both my Christian and my atheist biology professors laughed at that idea because it’s like saying that because coffee comes from a machine then there’s no such thing as a barrista.

On top of that, consider that back before there were telescopes some scholars who grew up reading Hebrew and became experts in it read the opening of Genesis and oncluded that:

• the universe started out smaller than a grain of mustard (idiom for “the smallest possible”)
• the universe was filled with fluid, which thinned as the universe expanded rapidly
• when the fluid was thin enough God commanded light to exist, and light flowed through the universe
• the universe is inconceivably ancient
• the Earth is not as old as the universe but is uncountably ancient

These conclusions didn’t come from any science because there really wasn’t much science yet, they came purely from studying the Hebrew.

@Burrawang

thus all God fearing, Bible believing Christians who know the Lord must make great efforts to demolish it

Why would I want to try to demolish something that has brought people I know to Christ?

[St.Roymond]

@Rob_Brewer

Alex O’Connor Exposes The Weaknesses of Richard Dawkins. Glen Scrivener REACTS.

I really like the way Glen focuses on the “three transcendentals” and how they are all necessary. That’s partly true since it takes me back to a debate in a philosophy class over whether any of “truth, goodness, beauty” could be dispensed with.

Dawkins does make a great point about how biologists may be looking for something that is exceedingly improbable. But he fails to also see that it would be exceedingly improbable that we should understand any of it.

Three cheers for category errors! It’s actually a hard concept to get across to a fair number of people. Dawkins is plainly one. He doesn’t recognize that those on one side of a phase change cannot come up with the rules on the other side of that phase change.

“Poetry from reality” is a great line by Glen.

Absolutely wonderful video!

[Burrawang]

@Christy

@Burrawang

What evidence do you offer that supports your belief that, “death existed in the world long before humans arrived on the planet.”?

The entire fossil record.

Thanks Christy, I guess that we will have to agree to disagree on this one, as I see the so called fossil record as stark testament to the global flood that God brought upon the whole Earth not that long ago.

Over what sort of time period do you believe the ‘fossil record’ was laid down?

Christy, you have stated that:
“You can believe that Jesus spoke creation into existence and is the author of life and not insist that Jesus spoke creation into existence as it is in its present form a few thousand years ago”
What Biblical support do you offer in support of this?

@Burrawang

Even though it is claimed to be science, I’ve yet to see an example where belief in it has produced a useful thing we use in the world today. Evolution is pseudo-science, a false paradigm through which many view the origins issue.

Okay. You aren’t a scientist.

I find it telling that instead of offering an enormous list of useful things that you believe have only come about as a result of belief in evolution, you make an incorrect assumption.

I was one of a handful of people operating one of the first atomic absorption spectrophotometers (AAS) for analytical research in the early 1970’s at a world class university likely before you were born. Of course AAS technology is now old hat and Gas Chromatography is now the most common tool used to determine the elemental chemical constituents of a sample.

God Bless,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

I see the so called fossil record as stark testament to the global flood that God brought upon the whole Earth not that long ago.

The fossil record is progressive and stratified. The global flood as described by YEC reshaped the planet. A flood of that power would jumbo everything together.

The identifiable geological eras from the Cambrian forward are identifiable by geological characteristics but also by their fossil inclusions. The fossil record displays a general progression from more primitive organisms, extinction boundaries, and sorting of creatures into their associated epochs. This is precisely what would be expected given life evolving over a span of hundreds of millions of years.

Given that YEC holds that all the animals that ever breathed coexisted together before the deluge, this presents a challenge - if they lived together why did they not die together? The entire geologic column constituting most of the fossil bearing sedimentary rock found on the planet, would have been laid down roughly over the course of a year.

No humans and dinosaur fossils have ever been found together, but that is only the thinnest sliver of the problem. Bear in mind that YEC believes that pretty much every creature that ever lived was present in the days leading to the flood. So we should find not just people with dinosaurs, but trilobites with crabs, dimetrodons with velociraptors, plesiosaurs with whales, triceratops with elephants, pterosaurs with buzzards - one could go on all day.

If the animals lived together, perhaps they segregated as the flood waters arose. Could it have been by the size of the animal? Only a minority of dinosaurs grew to the size of large sauropods or T. Rex, most were comparable to elephants and buffalo, and many down to the size of badgers. There is also no reason to believe that dinosaurs moved particularly faster or slower than an assortment of other animals. There are over a thousand identified species of dinosaur of many shapes and sizes; if they lived at the same time there is no reason to expect there would be no inter-sorting between Permian amphibians, cretaceous reptiles, and Holocene mammals. Finally, could they have sunk at different rates? That makes no sense for sorting either, some animals would be tangled up or suffer trauma and not even float to begin, and again, many amphibians, dinosaurs, and mammals are about the same size and would bloat and sink randomly. These things are not like clockwork.

So it makes little sense that if animals from the various epochs were all alive at the time of the flood, that there would be any effective mechanism that would result in any sorting whatsoever. But the fossil record is screaming clear. There has never been a solitary dinosaur found above the KT boundary, and never a modern mammal from below.

Flood geology holds that the deluge was an extraordinarily violent affair, spreading the continents apart, grinding primal rock to massive sedimentary formations, and jutting mountain ranges skywards. It is inconsistent that all this fury would reshape the planet but placidly lay each animal to rest in peace in some well ordered sequence followed the world over. That would be like, …what would be a good analogy? Well, it would be like a tornado in a junkyard assembling a 737 jetliner without anything out of place or in the wrong order. No Cambrian pieces after Jurassic, no Paleocene pieces before Triassic; nothing at all out of place.

The fossil record confirms a succession of ecologies, and contradicts a global flood.

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

Of course AAS technology is now old hat

It was old hat, or at least commonplace, in the 70’s.

Still, given your background, you should understand the limits to instrumental analysis and calibration, and why the very scientists ( Taylor and Southon) who performed the actual AMS calibration using diamond sources categorically reject the YEC misrepresentation of their work.

[Burrawang]

Thanks Steve,
for your response.

@glipsnort

Common descent by natural processes is a highly successful scientific theory that has successfully explained and predicted vast amounts of data in a wide range of fields.

OK then, what examples do you offer in support of your belief in “Common descent by natural processes” that clearly show the type of greater information complexity increase that would be required if evolution was real, i.e., an uphill change to the genome over time that demonstrates a net gain in complex specified information, without loss of fitness in other environments encountered in the natural world, other than variation within a created Biblical kind?

God Bless,
jon

[Burrawang]

Thanks Ron,

                I'll check it out.

God Bless,
jon

[St.Roymond]

@Burrawang

The idea that death through an assumed ‘deep time’ is not death as stated in, “The wages of sin is death”, contradicts the clear intention of the scriptural authors in Genesis and Romans.

Why should they be the same kind of death? “The wages of sin is death” only refers to entities that are able to sin. ProDeo gives one quite simple explanation:

@ProDeo

A&E lived in the Garden, a supernatural place: in the presence of God, no death, no sickness etc. Because of their rebellion they were thrown on the natural evolved earth, away from the presence of God, a place where death rules, in fact is a necessity.

@Burrawang

I really don’t know what more He could have done to ensure that the creation narrative in Genesis was not misinterpreted to mean anything other than what is stated in Genesis as historical narrative.

This makes God a bit of a thug since it requires that He have taken over the mind of the writer and forced him to write for an audience he would never meet in a literary type he would find alien. “Historical narrative” was not a literary type even in existence in the time of Moses, or even in the time of Solomon if you want to put Genesis that late – it just wasn’t within the worldview then.

I didn’t really grasp this until I was translating ancient Sumerian and such and somewhere in the middle of reading the Gilgamesh Epic it struck me that “These people just didn’t think the way we do!” The ancient Hebrews were part of the greater society in the ancient near east, and in fact they pretty much marinated in Egyptian mythology/theology for centuries, and that society just didn’t think in the same patterns we do!

@Burrawang

The science is absolutely consistent with the Biblical account in Genesis.

I’m not qualified to speak on evolution but I darned near got a degree in geology and I can say that if you are reading Genesis literally – which means according to a worldview of scientific materialism – then it does not fir with science at all. Just examining the rocks of the Himalayas shows that the Earth is at least hundreds of thousands of years old based on measurements that come not from theory but from laboratory investigation.

@Burrawang

Why do you think there is the appearance of a catastrophic global flood having occurred in the past in the sedimentary layers in places miles thick, across the entire planet including under the oceans

There isn’t. Claiming so violates not just known geology but physics as well.

@Burrawang

The Bible CAN be trusted to mean exactly what it says

Yes – if it is read as the types of ancient literature that its various authors intended and their audiences would have understood. To claim that God made those ancient writers write in ways that suit us is insulting to God; that is the sort of things that demons do.

[St.Roymond]

@Burrawang

Why do we find Carbon 14 in many diamonds that are supposedly 300 million years old when all detectable C would be gone in a tiny fraction of that immense period of time?

Contamination, or anomalies.

For starters, C-14 dating only applies to things that were once alive. I have never so much as heard that any diamonds were ever alive.
Second, there is a thing called the degree of accuracy, generally given as “error bars”. Even given a batch of absolutely pure C-12, equipment can show the presence of C-13 and/or C-14.
Third, diamonds are rarely pure; they have what are called inclusions, which is just a word meaning that bots of other material are trapped in the crystal matrix. The presence of inclusions means the error bars will be wider. If nitrogen is found in an inclusion, it can be transformed to C-14 in the same way as happens in the atmosphere. Since nitrogen is a very common inclusion any diamond that is no longer buried under meters of soil can have C-14 in it – in fact it would be surprising if it didn’t.
Fourth, any diamonds where there is any radioactivity in the ground can end up with C-14 also.

@Burrawang

I’ve met Andrew Snelling many years ago, and he is a fine Christian and God fearing man who is a geologist. He gets it right, " Successful oil…exploration and discoveries do not depend on believing the strata are millions of years old. In fact, the supposed ages are irrelevant, both to the exploration techniques used and to successful discoveries."

My favorite geology professor worked in oil exploration before he became a professor. He debunked this claim before Snelling even made it, which indicates that either Snelling is lying or is incompetent.

If anyone can find petroleum deposits without using the established ages of geological formations it is because they are reading charts developed by people who actually did so.

@Burrawang

I refute the blatant false accusation that you have made against a fine Christian man

A refutation means you have provided evidence contrary to the assertion. You have not done so. What you actually do is “reject” the accusation.

[Rob_Brewer (Robert Brewer)]

@St.Roymond

I really like the way Glen focuses on the “three transcendentals” and how they are all necessary. That’s partly true since it takes me back to a debate in a philosophy class over whether any of “truth, goodness, beauty” could be dispensed with.

I assume that the traditional triad of transcendentals—Goodness, Truth, and Beauty—is well-established. However, some philosophical traditions and thinkers have included the concept of unity or oneness as transcendental. I think the idea of transcendentals is not rigidly confined to a specific set, and there are different perspectives which emphasise different aspects of the ultimate nature of reality.

In the context of unity or oneness as a potential fourth transcendental, the concept often aligns with the idea of a fundamental, unifying principle that underlies and connects all of existence. Regarding Metaphysical Unity, the notion that there is a fundamental oneness or unity at the metaphysical level of reality suggests that all things are interconnected or emanate from a single source. Thereby viewing the universe as a unified whole, diversity and multiplicity become expressions of an underlying unity or oneness and as an attribute of the divine, where the ultimate reality is seen as a singular, indivisible source.

Including unity or oneness as transcendental appeals to a holistic approach to understanding reality, acknowledging the interconnectedness and underlying unity of diverse phenomena.

[St.Roymond]

@glipsnort

It’s overwhelmingly clear from reading Paul that he thought that

More accurately, he thought that in relation to human death, not any other kind.

@Christy

Okay. You aren’t a scientist.

Or at least not a biologist.

[Burrawang]

It’s fascinating that a considerable number of dinosaur fossils are found with the head thrown back that appears to be a characteristic of death by drowning. I certainly do not claim to have all the answers, I most certainly don’t. But I do trust God’s Word, the Bible.
The Bible is very clear about the global flood, and when I put on Biblical glasses, (as opposed to ‘deep time’ ‘evolutionary glasses’), so to speak, I see that what I observe in the real world is consistent with there being a completely catastrophic global flood not that long ago that reshaped the planet in about 1 year.
One of the greatest problems that I had with evolution many decades ago is the absence of transitional forms that should be present in billions upon trillions, but yet we only have a disputed handful at best.
Sure the rubbery evolution belief will come up with any number of ‘plausible’ explanations, but whatever is dreamed up, the real fact is that transitional forms should be there and they simply aren’t.

God Bless,
jon

[St.Roymond]

@rsewell

there is no evidence at all that diamonds contain any C-14

It’s my understanding that some has been found but it was in inclusions that contained nitrogen and was in diamonds that had spent time in the sunlight.

@Burrawang

I guess that we will have to agree to disagree on this one, as I see the so called fossil record as stark testament to the global flood

Genesis does not tell of a global flood, it tells of a flood of the world known to Noah.
And if you want to read it literally, it’s still not a global flood, it’s a flood that was held back from flowing off the edge of the Earth by the bronze-hard firmament surrounding the Earth-disk.

@Burrawang

What Biblical support do you offer in support of this?

How about the fact that the Bible does not anywhere in any way make any claims about the age of the Earth? or that according to some ancient Hebrew scholars it actually tells us of a universe that is old beyond comprehension?

@Christy

Okay. You aren’t a scientist.

@Burrawang

I find it telling that instead of offering an enormous list of useful things that you believe have only come about as a result of belief in evolution, you make an incorrect assumption.

She didn’t make an assumption, she drew a conclusion.

@Burrawang

operating one of the first atomic absorption spectrophotometers (AAS) for analytical research in the early 1970’s at a world class university likely before you were born.

Which makes you a technician.

@rsewell

The fossil record is progressive and stratified. The global flood as described by YEC reshaped the planet. A flood of that power would jumbo everything together.

Yes. The hydrology is all wrong for a global flood, as are folded rock formations.

@rsewell

The entire geologic column constituting most of the fossil bearing sedimentary rock found on the planet, would have been laid down roughly over the course of a year.

Plus pretty much all shelled organism should be found towards the bottom, not in different layers in different formations.

[St.Roymond]

@Burrawang

transitional forms . . . we only have a disputed handful at best.

That wasn’t true when I took geology courses in the early 1990s, and now forms have been found that were predicted based on evolutionary theory.

[St.Roymond]

I observe that the title of the thread as it refers to Adam as the “Federal Head of Man” does not require a young Earth to be valid.

That makes the dominant theme from the OP rather odd, since it is more about “science is bad” than about Adam.

Indeed it doesn’t even require that evolution be in error; all that is required is that there was a human male who was the first to be morally responsible before God. This is evident from any fair reading of the text given that one of the prime rules of textual interpretation is to not add anything that is not found there.

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@St.Roymond

It’s my understanding that some has been found but it was in inclusions that contained nitrogen and was in diamonds that had spent time in the sunlight.

Yes, a minute amount of nuclear spallation happens in entrained nitrogen underground as well.

[Bill_II]

@Burrawang

The Bible is very clear about the global flood,

My biggest problem with the global flood is the complete lack of any mention made of the many, many forms of life that weren’t on the ark. The ark might have saved air breathing animals but it didn’t save

• Aquatic mammals.
• Aquatic vertebrates. If the flood was fresh water it would kill all of the marine forms. If the flood was salty it would kill all the fresh water forms.
• Plant life of all types.
• Insects.
• Soil. Soil is actually a quite complex mixture of mineral, bacteria, insect, and other forms of life. After the global flood there would have been no soil left on the surface to support plant life, but it wouldn’t matter because all the plant life would be dead. There would be no soil to support the vines that Noah is said to have planted.