It’s rigor mortis.
Terrestrial animals, yes, quite a lot of the very well-preserved ones do seem to have drowned. For marine and freshwater organisms, drowning is less relevant.
This is simple. Scale and range matter, which if you ignore you will not get reliable results. If your boat sinks because you ignored good building practices, there is no point in pouting and saying nobody then can build a worthy boat. Should kitchen scales be called into question because they do not stand up to weighing trucks? Should truck scales be called into question because they do not work for your cake recipe? Carbon dating is rock solid within the applicable range when proper protocols are observed, and reports contain the appropriate uncertainties.
Here is guidance from BETA Analytic concerning Lab Capacity & Detection Limits
Detection Limits: 43,500 years BP (0.44 pMC)
This isn’t your barber, or skip the dishes delivery guy, or YEC speaker talking - this is straight from the lab. What they deal with every working day. They are in the best position to know the limitations and performance of their own instrument, what it can and cannot do. They do not need to be informed by armchair quarterbacks who do not even watch the game let alone play it.
Yes, the Paul Giem who replied to me
I agree with you, which is why I have never said that the turndown goes to zero. I disagree with some of my colleagues’ previous statements, and hope that they have, or will, come around to recognizing that laboratory contamination is not usually zero (I don’t like to say “never”, but in this case we come pretty close).
I had what I thought to be a very productive conversation with Paul Giem concerning C-14 in coal, the outcome of which was that it is a given that coal is contaminated in place by groundwater and micro-organisms, and that laboratory contamination is on top of that.
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Yes, pretty self evident, and for shelled organisms, suspect burial in an anoxic environment less a factor, which is why we have so many more of them.
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I had to wince at “most people” when talking about the most plausible theory for the development of the species, and it reminded me of “I had no need of that hypothesis.” (“Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là”), said to be the reply of Pierre-Simon Laplace to Napoleon, who had asked why he hadn’t mentioned God in his book on astronomy. Although “most people” would probably not say it so eloquently, the Abrahamic God has become a hypothesis that stands alongside others. When reading Genesis as a poetic and symbolic mythology of “Beginnings,” it is an astute story, but when it becomes a proposition people offer it as an alternative to scientific theory, not so.
Listening to Rabbi Tovia Singer, a fundamentalist and Zionist Jew, debating fundamentalist Christians, and convincingly stripping away the assumption that the NT is a continuation of the OT and Christ is the Messiach, pointing out the inconsistencies, it occurred to me that this is a discussion between two factions that are often named together but are at loggerheads because they have assertions that they mutually refute. To an outsider, I see how many religious traditions view creation stories as symbolic or metaphorical rather than literal accounts of historical events, and it is often only when lacking an education that people take metaphorical stories to be facts.
The proposal that evolution “is the major anti-God pretension of our age” assumes that the “hypothesis” of evolution is in opposition to a Creator God. In contrast, in most people’s minds, it is not opposed to anything of the sort, but is a theory that most do not fully understand as to why there is diversity on the planet. "Most people” I talk to are quite agnostic about how the world and human beings came to be, and if anything, scepticism is the counterthesis.
That’s a nice story, but it isn’t in the text.
I would say that if the writer whom God had chosen intended to mean “perfect” he would have used a word meaning that. Since he didn’t, claiming that is changing the text.
Why does it have to conform to your modern scientific worldview’s understanding of authority? “Accuracy” was not a criterion for a text being authoritative.
They believed that because that is what their YEC pastors taught them: if any part of the Bible is ‘wrong’, then none of it can be trusted.
Nope – the lie that did its work was the YEC lie that the Bible teaches science and if it gets one thing wrong then none of it can be trusted.
Over and over again when I was at university that’s what students said when they left the faith: they were just doing what their pastors had taught them. Over and over again they left the faith because they had not been taught that Jesus was the foundation, they’d been taught that Genesis was. In the few times where I had the privilege of being able to intervene when a YEC-believing student hit that crisis it was by explaining that Jesus was the foundation that they clung to faith.
The deception is found in the YEC insistence that Genesis has to be interpreted according to scientific materialism instead of being read as the ancient literature it is. The idea that the scriptures have to be 100% scientifically and historically accurate does not come from the scriptures, it comes from the philosophy of scientific materialism that infected the church. It is scientific materialism speaking when someone claims that parts of the opening Creation account have to be taken scientifically.
The Creation accounts must not be read as though they are someone’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he observed and reported on, they must be read as the kind of literature the writer penned them as and the original audience understood them as. That means recognizing that the writer of the first Creation account was brilliant: he took the Egyptian creation story and turned it into two kinds of literature at once while thoroughly trashing the Egyptian – and by extension the Mesopotamian – pantheon. But YECism throws away what that writer accomplished by demanding that God had to force an ancient person to write for people that wouldn’t be born for three thousand years!
The Bible is more than human literature, but it is never less than that – and treating it as though it had any intention of talking about science makes it less. Here’s a bit that explains that better than I can:
Oops – double answer.
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Certainly, that is not specifically written in Genesis if that is what you mean, but it is quite clear to me at least that the whole of creation was tainted and affected by the rebellion of Adam against God in the garden on that fateful day many thousands of years ago.
A little further on the matter from the New Testament:
The heavens declare the glory of God, but the wicked deeds of his image-bearers declare something as well: the corruption of sin and the shadow of death that pervade this creation.
Given the condition of creation, Paul told the Romans that we’re not the only ones longing for what is to come.
“ For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.” Rom 8:19.
“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” (8:22).
And in Biblical context:
Romans 8
Deliverance from Bondage
8:1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3 For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 6 For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, 7 because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
9 However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. 10 If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
12 So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh-- 13 for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. 15 For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. 23 And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. 24 For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.
Our Victory in Christ
26 In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; 27 and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. 29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; 30 and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.
31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? 33 Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; 34 who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. 35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 Just as it is written,
“FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG;
WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.”
37 But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Many of your comments do not justify a reply. Your frequent use of YEC which I presume to mean (Young Earth Creationists) i.e., those of us that accept the Bible as being accurate, inerrant and meaning precisely what is written, including of course that creation took place thousands of years ago and not billions of years ago. World renowned secular scholars of Hebrew have stated that they believe the intent of the author of Genesis 1 was historical narrative, i.e., an account of what actually occurred during creation week. It is not written as some sort of poetic literature, it is written as a record of what occurred.
Well, that’s news tome!
I have never stated “that Genesis has to be interpreted according to scientific materialism” that is your straw man, red herring or whatever you want to call it, but it is certainly not my view. Your insistence on tying almost everything I have written back to what you see as the terrible bogey man stereotype that you have attribute to YEC is unjustified, palpably incorrect, and blatantly unscientific if that is important to you.
Our Creator and Saviour did not leave humanity in the dark with regard to origins. I believe that people were extremely intelligent in ancient times, far more intelligent than you or I, our present epoch in history may cause many to think that we are more intelligent but I submit that is only because of the knowledge that has amassed since ancient times that gives the appearance of intelligence. Raw intelligence is independent of knowledge and is the ability of a person to find solutions to problems that present.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that I do not see any reason to believe that the writer of Genesis meant anything other than what we have interpreted now in 2024, (with losses as English has far fewer nuanced words than the original Hebrew), the basic message remains the same, that is the brilliance of our God Who ensured that no matter when the text is read throughout history, the meaning is substantially the same, the world was created in 6 ordinary days in the order specified in the text by the Word of God.
Of course until the printing press was invented and multi millions of Bibles printed, translated and spread out throughout the Earth, there were not many people who had access to it throughout much of history. The reliance was that those who were literate with access would pass on the profound truths to the masses.
Our God is true and just and righteous, those that did not hear, He knows each one of them by name, even every hair on their heads, and He knows their heart. He will judge with righteous judgement in truth and justice and absolute fairness as He does not wish that any should perish.
The deceiver on the other hand wants to take as many down with him as he can,he was a murder from the beginning and no truth is in him.
The negative allegations that you continually make about “YEC” 's is not only boring, it is downright wrong.
The people that you are calling YEC’s and liars in what reads to me as a derogatory tone are God fearing individuals who have accepted Jesus gracious gift of salvation; they love the Lord and are searching just as you are. Just because they do not accept evolution, i.e., agree with your worldview, does not mean that they are any less important as people for whom our Lord Jesus died.
I certainly believe that evolution is a massive deception that dominates the academic world presently.
I believe the Bible as it is written,and as the Holy Spirit reveals profound truths as He sees fit in my journey.
It is abundantly clear to me that evolution is a philosophy that is religiously held by its adherents and they will not tolerate anyone saying anything that exposes the lie of evolution which is what it is. Thus the main resort that I have seen from evolutionists is to attack relentlessly until the dissenter is silenced. A fair amount of that appears to be evident on this Biologos website forum.
So let me understand what you appear to be saying.
I get that it is possible for a person to be authoritative without being accurate, but do you really believe that our Creator, who spread out all the galaxies, who formed our solar system, the Earth, all life, created and wrote the initial DNA programming code in all of the original created organisms, that we are only just scratching the surface in understanding; do you really believe that Jesus was inaccurate?
God Bless,
jon
This.
@Burrawang Another of the most fundamental rules of measurement is that sources of error must be quantified. Unreliability is not binary, and contamination levels of 0.5-1% do not justify claims that every sample with 5-10% modern carbon or more must also be contamination, right across the board.
This is, as I said, something that I would expect every scientist, every engineer and every lab technician to be fully aware of, to fully understand, and to take into account. It’s the elementary basics. Measurement 101. The stuff you learn in the first half hour of the first practical class of any A level physics course worth its salt. But it’s a point that young earthists ignore time and time and time again.
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Hi Bill,
thanks for your honest comment.
I certainly do not have all the answers but what i do believe from years of research and a dose of common sense is that:
-
Aquatic mammals.
I have always thought that aquatic mammals such as dolphins and whales must have been able to ride out the cataclysm as they are well suited to life in the water. It is likely that many perished from various causes that may include being hit by flying rocks from near surface volcanic eruptions, thick sediment slurries etc., but as they were not on the ark and exist now, it is clear that some survived. -
Aquatic vertebrates.
In many freshwater aquatic vertebrates there is a fairly good tolerance for them to survive in marine waters and the reverse is true for many marine species. Again, no doubt many individuals died and became part of the fossil record, but undoubtedly enough survived the changed salinity concentration conditions to enable reproduction in the years since the global flood that resulted in the species alive today in both environments. -
Plant life of all types.
There would undoubtedly have been massive floating islands of vegetation and seed also that would have remained buoyant on the surface. I presume that those floating raft islands must have carried enough living vegetative matter and seeds to re propagate the land masses of the planet over time. -
Insects.
I think it is likely that many insects would have ended up on the floating vegetation islands that were probably quite enormous, given the quantity of plant material that was smashed and torn out of its in-situ growth position before the flood. -
Soil.
Soil is as you rightly say, quite complex, but from what we have seen when islands pop up from time to time in the present ,it does not take plant life very long to get a foothold, thus the soil required to kick start must be sufficient to support plant life and would undoubtedly have increased in complexity of species richness over succeeding years. As good an example as any is the island of Surtsey off the Iceland coast that initially rose out of the sea as a volcanic eruption in 1963. See the articles at: https://creation.com/the-lessons-of-surtsey AND https://creation.com/surtsey-the-young-island-that-looks-old AND a short 1minute video of Surtsey at Surtsey Still Surprises · Creation.com
Photo taken on the island of Surtsey prior to 2007
God Bless,
jon
Creationism is the major anti-God pretention of our age. Instead of telling God how things must be according to their own fantasies, God fearing people will listen to everything God is telling us in the earth, sky, and our own biology. Bible believing Christians who know the Lord will make great efforts to demolish these blasphemers who enslave God to their made up human theology in order to use God and religion for the purpose of power over other people.
So instead of picking and choosing from the Bible as they pick and choose among all the things God shows to us, let us look at the word of God in its entirety.
2 Corinthians 10 2-7 I beg of you that when I am present I may not have to show boldness with such confidence as I count on showing against some who suspect us of acting in worldly fashion. 3 For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, 6 being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete. 7 Look at what is before your eyes. If any one is confident that he is Christ’s, let him remind himself that as he is Christ’s, so are we.
And not only the whole of the Bible but the whole of God’s communication to us as He reveals to us in all of His creation.
It is a fallacy to claim that just because some things happen quickly, that somehow means that everything could have happened quickly. Young earthists love to do this, but it proves nothing. It is one thing to create an island overnight out of lava and volcanic ash. It is a completely different matter to create an island overnight out of shale or limestone.
No professional scientist was surprised in the slightest by Surtsey and no professional scientist goes by subjective and hand-waving concepts of “looks old” when determining the ages of things. They go by careful and rigorous measurements of processes whose constant rates are much more well established and they cross-check their measurements against each other. Any attempt to argue that the earth is young must account for the detailed measurements down to their exact precision, and for the consilience of the cross-checks between them.
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It doesn’t say that anything corrupted Creation, it just says it awaits eagerly for us to be revealed. We’re the burden that Creation bears, as a womb bears a child.
That’s the only view that insists that some things in the Creation story have to be scientifically accurate. It’s no straw man, it’s historically where YECism comes from: the idea that scripture has to be scientifically and historically correct is found nowhere in scripture, it only entered human history with the rise of scientific materialism.
That’s a nice science fiction story, but that’s all it is – it has nothing to do with scripture.
The only reason not to think that the writer meant something different than what you think his words mean in English is being uninformed, either intentionally or unintentionally. The original writer knew nothing of science, indeed nothing of what we call historical narrative. Making it read sense in modern English literary terms is cultural and spiritual imperialism demanding that the ancient writer has to write according to a modern preferred worldview.
But that’s false. Orthodox Christians down through the centuries have read the account in a number of different ways, most of them having nothing to do with “6 ordinary days”; they have held that the days are mere poetry because obviously God would have created everything at once; that it is all allegory because obviously humans aren’t capable of understanding how God actually did it; that it is allegory because obviously God doesn’t talk like a man and in fact couldn’t speak words before there was a world where sound could exist; that the days are actually ages because history obviously divides into thousand-year periods so each day must have been a thousand years (and that shows up as early as the fourth century); and more – and I say “obviously” because in every case it was as obvious to them as your view is to you. Then there was that interpretation by Hebrew scholars who grew up speaking Hebrew who said it tells us that the universe is incomprehensibly old, starting out as the smallest thing possible, filled with fluid, and expanded unimaginably rapidly, and that the Earth itself is also uncountably ancient; along with those who saw it obviously as a story of God building Himself a Temple where the says were symbolic (Dr. John Walton is not the first to see the temple inauguration literary type there); and those who recognized that it copies the Egyptian creation story except that it turns all the Egyptian deities into creations/creatures of YHWH_Elohim, made to serve Him (that also isnot new).
The reality is that the Creation accounts were written as ancient literature and must be understood that way – which Dr. Michael Heiser explains quite clearly in the video I linked. It happens also to be two literary types at once, which is a brilliant accomplishment since its outline is lifted from the Egyptian creation story, with three purposes at once (each of which can be seen as corresponding to one Person of the Trinity). You should watch this video as well–
Understanding Genesis with John Walton - BioLogos
Or if you want to understand it better, watch this all the way through:
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Those I call liars are, by the evidence. Whether they are God-fearing does not excuse them; people like Snelling lie both in word and picture (as was noted above).
I don’t care about evolution, I care about the text. I will comment on geology because I almost got a geology degree and thus have a basis on which to comment.
I don’t criticize anyone for not agreeing with my worldview, I criticize people for abusing the text of the scriptures. And anyone who, as YECists do, interpret the scriptures according to their scientific ideas, is abusing the scriptures – unless they have studied the original languages sufficiently to be able to read those languages when handed literature from them that is something they have never seen before, and studied the types of ancient literature that were current when the various texts were written, and grappled with the ancient worldview(s) enough to be able to set aside their modern worldview, then they are charlatans when it comes to interpreting the scriptures. They may be well-meaning, but that does not excuse dabbling where they haven’t actually done their homework.
If someone claimed to be interpreting the plays of Aristophanes, or the philosophy of Plotinus, without having read those authors in the original languages and studied to understand their worldviews, they would be rightly ignored because they would be claiming expertise in human literature they hadn’t bothered to truly study. The scriptures are human literature, and they must thus be treated with the same respect.
And that is the YEC problem: they lack the respect due the writers whom the Holy Spirit chose and prepared because they assume they don’t need to do the work required to actually listen to those writers.
Anyone who claims to have studied the Genesis Creation accounts who has not done their homework as described above is at best fooling himself because God chose those writers purposely knowing they would write using their own language and their own literature in their own worldview so that they could speak to the people among whom they lived.
Fine – I don’t particularly care what you believe about evolution.
If you’ve only read it in English then actually you don’t: to believe the Bible as written you have to do the homework described above.
Why do you think that to be “accurate” requires conforming to your preferred modern worldview?
You’re missing two important aspects: first, the soil bacteria and other organisms that are required for most plants to grow are deposited fairly quickly via arriving on dust blown by wind; this was learned in the blast area of Mount Saint Helens; second, the plants that show up quickly fall into a category called pioneer plants – a category I am familiar with due to my conservation work where what passes for “soil” initially is just beach sand piled by the blowing wind into dunes. If I skip the step of introducing pioneer plants then there are quite a few native plants that just won[t survive.
Yes, we looked at Surtsey in geology courses, botany courses, and soil science courses, and it conforms to the pattern I described above.
The difference between this and the soil buried by the flood kept from flowing off the edges of the Earth by the bronze-hard dome God put over the earth-disk is that the soil inundated by the flood would have been devoid of the microorganisms that make mere dirt into soil, and there would have been no source for those organisms; such a flood would have killed them all.
But then that isn’t the flood that Genesis tells us about; it tells us about a flood that wiped out the world that Noah knew of. Thinking that the Hebrew word that means “dirt” refers to the entire globe is self-deception.
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It’s as simple as this. Honesty has rules. If young earthists don’t want to be accused of lying, they need to stick to the rules. Especially if they have PhDs in the subject(s) in question, because the rules are much stricter for teachers (James 3:1 again) and subject matter experts speaking within their own areas of expertise.
And if they really were God fearing then they would stick to the rules. Claiming to be a God fearing Christian does not give anyone a free pass to do whatever they like. And “agreeing with your worldview” has nothing to do with it.
In case anyone’s wondering about this: I’m continuing to reply for the benefit of other people who are reading this discussion. Posts on a public forum are not a private two-way conversation; they can and do provide information and understanding to onlookers reading them as well.
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Well, what can I say!
I was just asking what sort of time period you believe… I do not know you, I have no idea what time period you think has elapsed since the fossil record was laid down.
Of course I have a thorough understanding of secular beliefs about ‘deep time’ as the principal and absolutely necessary requirement to make evolution remotely plausible on the face of it, and correspondingly when the fossils are ASSUMED by secularists and obviously others to have been laid down.
It would appear from reading your reply that you believe the secular ‘deep time’ assumption to be fact. i.e., hundreds of millions of years.
In secular academia, I find it somewhat troubling that fossils are used to date rock strata and rock strata are used to date fossils, circular reasoning that occurs in the placing and dating of fossils within the geological column
I suggest you read:
https://creation.com/interpreting-the-changing-fossil-record AND https://creation.com/reinforcement-syndrome-in-earth-sciences
Wow, that’s a big call, "Evolution is true because it makes sense of empirical evidence. We know the earth is not merely 6,000 years old because we can measure the earth’s age. "
I don’t agree that evolution makes sense of the empirical evidence. After researching this subject for a very long time, I can confidently state that the empirical evidence is ignored and the just so story of evolution continues for its faithful religious believers as proven fact, despite the glaringly obvious real empirical facts that disqualify it as a scientific theory.
As for stating that "we can measure the earth’s age." ! That is a statement of faith on your part. A lot of assumptions must be made that it is not possible to verify.
In rigorous scientific reality there is absolutely no way that we can know the age of the Earth from the physical world of the present. To say otherwise betrays a real lack of understanding of what science can and can’t do. Sure we can theorise, build models, and make our best guesses, but at the end of the day, we cannot know! The worldview of any scientist will have considerable bearing on the assumptions and values decided upon by that scientist.
Does evolution really make sense of the empirical evidence?
I don’t think so!
In fact the belief in evolution is largely despite the evidence.
Charles Darwin himself in his Origin of Species work stated:
“The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on the Earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain, and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory”
Well, I truly believe that Charles Darwin could be somewhat excused at the time that he lived and the paucity of knowledge and quantity of catalogued fossils that existed at that time in middle of the nineteenth century.
But I wonder what he would think if he was alive today and discovered that although countless millions of fossils have been unearthed and catalogued since the 1850’s, the scarcity of any transitional forms remains a very real empirical falsification of evolution. The fossil record has species appearing abruptly, the Cambrian explosion is but one case in point, there are numerous living fossils that are the same today as they were hundreds of millions of years ago, yet no change is evident in their morphology.
Just to be sure we are on the same page, I am talking about evolution here in the broadest sense, that is the microbes to man ascension over time sense of the term.
Evolution believing people are expected to, and do, swallow that within the same period that the living fossils remained unchanged, vast changes occurred to other organisms where complex genetic information coding for improved novel structures and control systems that it is assumed again is supposed to have arisen spontaneously without an intelligent designer, which is obviously highly questionable to anyone who understands what that actually means is believed to have occurred within the multiple overlapping genes in the genetic code of each organism.
*** Why is there no change in the living fossils?**
Answer: Because evolution is a widely held, powerfully reinforced myth, it may be the majority view at present but that doesn’t exempt it from being the greatest hoax on humanity in the present era.
*** Why don’t we find billions upon trillions of transitional forms?**
Answer: Because they don’t exist. Evolution is a myth, there are no transitional forms!
*** After the imagined hundreds of millions of years, why do dinosaur bones (actual bone) still exist and why do some contain agreed remnants of soft tissue such as actin, collagen, DNA fragments of a few base pairs, red bloods cells, blood vessels etc?**
Answer: They aren’t that old, merely a few thousand years old which makes much more sense of what we find using rigorous empirical science.
*** Why do we find Carbon 14 in many diamonds that are supposedly 300 million years old when all detectable C14 would be gone in a tiny fraction of that immense period of time?**
Answer: They simply aren’t that old! And no contamination has been accounted for and ruled out.
Of course regarding the answer to the last question here I expect the accusations of lies and contamination of C14, but that is utter nonsense, the diamonds tested plainly contained C14; there is no escaping that fact.
I expect that accepting that diamonds really do contain C14 would have a paradigm shift shattering effect on those that believe the diamonds are hundreds of millions to billions of years old. So be it! It is the truth!
God Bless,
jon
Claiming Evolution as a complete hoax is probably an extreme view. just as claiming Evolution disproves the existence of God is the other extreme. Logic would suggest that there must be a middle ground.
The lack of transient fossils des not disprove the evolutionary process. It only pours doubt on the scope of evolution.
The problem with YEC is that it places scripture over scientific evidence, some f which is not biological or directly part of Evolutionary theory.
Incorporating Evolution into God’s creationary method would seem to be the most logical way forward.
Unfortunately we then reach an impasse whereby theory cannot be proved or disproved by the evidence we have available. The basic proof of the evolutionary process is almost irrefutable. Denying it just reduces the credibility of following arguments.
Richard
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Lets look at Genesis 1 as a study.
Genesis 1
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
4 God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
5 God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.*
6 Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
7 God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.
8 God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.*
9 Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.
10 God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so.
12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.
13 There was evening and there was morning, a third day.*
14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;
15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.
16 God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.
17 God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,
18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.
19 There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.*
20 Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.
21 God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
22 God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
23 There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.*
24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so.
25 God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.*
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so.
31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.*
As I have stated previously, the basic message remains the same despite your claims to the contrary.
If as you claim the texts meaning is so radically different in the original Hebrew text, then please enlighten us all as to what the differences are to the above English NASB version.
God Bless,
jon
The moon is not a light in its own right.
There is no dome over the earth
This is a poetic account placing God as the creator rather than the notion that parts of creation made themselves or have some power over us. The seven day timescale is to establish the Sabbath. it does not indicate a specific timescale for creation. You have already changed it by claiming 6000 years instead of 1 week.
IOW you cannot take Genesis 1 literally
Richard
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And another problem I didn’t mention. What did the carnivores eat while waiting for the herbivore population to increase to a size that could survive predation? What did the herbivores eat while waiting several years for the plant life to return?
And let’s not forget the hyper-evolution needed to get the diversity of life up to what we see today.
But how about the aquatic mammals that don’t live in the water 100% of the time. Or how do they eat? The flood lasted a year. In the chaotic flood waters they would simply starve to death. Marine environments are fragile.
Wishful thinking. Ever try to keep a marine aquarium going? If the salinity isn’t just right all of your fish die.
But what about plants that don’t reproduce from seed? Even seeds don’t do well when stored in wet conditions for a year. Also plants need to be distributed world wide so that is an awful lot of floating islands. And the islands all have to land in the proper environment. Again a bunch of wishful thinking.
And the insects that live underground? Who have a short lifespan and would have to reproduce several generations during the year long flood. And what keeps these vegetation islands from simply rotting away due to the length of time they had to spend floating around? What would keep mosquitoes alive for a year without the blood meal required for their reproduction?
It took years for the plant life to “pop up” on Surtsey and the bigger problem is this life “popped up” because the life came from somewhere else.
If you want to believe in a global flood you have to assume God performed a whole lot of unrecorded miracles for no reason other than supporting your particular interpretation of Genesis. Sorry but I don’t think God works in that way. Miracles happen when God wants to send a message.
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