@adamjedgar Adam, great post; thank you!
Especially when it comes to the Eden account, I think the âtraditionalâ reading definitely needs to be learned. Just coming to it fresh, I think practically anybody from biblical times to our own would take a story with a person split in two, a talking beast, and fruit that gives immortality as something other than straight history.
Further, some of the most important points of the text â such as the complementarity of male and female or the coming defeat of evil by a real human â only emerge from the text if we allow it to speak symbolically. Otherwise, itâs just one man who makes a nice poem about his wife and a future human whoâs going to step on a snake.
I donât think youâll find many people here who think it should be. The text doesnât teach evolution! That comes from studying creation. Itâs like when I read Psalm 139 about how I, like the psalmist, was knit together by Godâs hands in the womb and woven together in the depths of the earth. It doesnât teach all the science weâve learned about how a baby develops. But it doesnât need to be read as contradicting that science. Its purpose is different from a scientific account.
So no, donât stretch Genesis to mean evolution. But consider that itâs quite possible to accept what the text teaches about God as creator and provider while also seeing evolution and other natural processes as some of Godâs knitting needles.
And then we get another story where God speaks to give voice to a problem (âItâs not good for the mortal to be aloneâ) but then gets down to business solving it. So which picture is accurate? Did God create by speaking, or by forming wet dust? Both!
Each image communicates something different. The first account shows Godâs transcendent sovereignty in creating everything by fiat decree in a beautifully ordered timetable. The second shows Godâs provident immanence as God meets the needs of the land and the human by sculpting mud and blowing breath and cleaving one flesh into two beings.
Or perhaps God could have revealed the timing of creation, but instead chose to use the structure of seven days for our instruction and imitation. The days of work, like the day of rest, are for us rather than revealing actual facts about how long God works before resting. As Jesus declares, âMy Father is always at his work, and I too am working.â But at the same time, according to Hebrews 4, God remains in his seventh day rest â and calls us to join in! One canât limit the seventh day to the distant past.
Sure, but the problem is that even those of us who accept it donât read it the same way. Yes, things would be simpler if all Christians agreed with you, or all with me. But since thatâs not going to happen, how can we present a good witness to the world even when we disagree?
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@adamjedgar Have I ever said this to you? When youâre not waging war on evolution and deep geological time, but when your focus is on Christ and the Gospel, some of the other things you post are pure gold.
I think that if thereâs one mistake that those of us on the evolutionary creation/theistic evolution end of the spectrum are particularly at risk of making (and certainly I speak for myself here), it is taking offence at bad arguments or bad attitudes to science in the Church. For some of us, such bad attitudes have resulted in adverse consequences of varying degrees of seriousness (which is why we can come across as particularly snarky or even confrontational at times), but in recent weeks and months Iâve come to the conclusion that I just need to forgive those Christians who have thrown me off track in the past in that respect.
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I have heard this type of argument before â attempting to link the teaching of evolution in schools to a decline in church attendance. I think it would be hard to rigorously establish such a direct correlation, with so many complex societal factors involved. But if you have a reference to such a study, I would be interested. Even if there was such a correlation, it might have something to do with some teachers falsely attaching it to atheism.
On the other hand, evolution is taught in Chinese schools (Creation and evolution in public education - Wikipedia) yet I am told by a friend who worked in China for 30+ years that the Christian church is growing explosively there. Perhaps this is something to consider.
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Only you think that this makes any sense at all as a reasonable response.
The text does not say that in the original, it only appears to say that when it gets read like itâs a modern encyclopedia entry.
The fact that youâre insisting on reading it that way despite having had the truth explained to you is sad.
No, theyâre not â historical narrative did not exist when that was written.
No, it doesnât, and the vast majority of the worldâs Christians understand that.
We all do â we just donât accept the idea that ancient literature should be read like it was someoneâs great-grandfatherâs diary of events he had witnessed.
The plain text is not science or fact. It depicts Godâs awesome power and His intent that humans have a place to flourish: this is why He made the universe in the first place.
How can I support such a statement?
- Genesis begins, Day One, by declaring that God is the source of the big bang.
- At the same time Genesis throws away the fine print of the big bang in order to slide past the pagan cosmology.
- Why?
- Because denying that ground-level understanding, that perception-is-reality, would have meant an immense treatise on how stars formed, stars fused elements, how planets formed - - and so much more.
Day Two places a forever supply of rain above the firmament.
Day Four places the sun, moon, and stars beneath that water - they cross within the vault of the heavens (the firmament)
Yet Creation itself tells us that the big bang is a real thing and that Earth, a ball of iron and rock with a thin crispy crust of continents surrounded by films of water (the seas) orbits the nearest star.
Creation itself tells us that the Six Days were window dressing for the real content of Genesis, which is theology.
Profound theology, yet presented in such a simplified form that ordinary illiterate minds could respond to it in awe and devotion. Just the same way that six-year-olds respond, in Sunday School.
I hope this clarifies things.
Peace and Christian love
Joel
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Hi Andy,
thanks for your post.
I have searched on several sites without a great deal of success, but there are various sources of information that support the view that the decline in church attendance is largely through not accepting the creation account in Genesis as factual historical narrative.
You could check out:
AND
AND
The Unites States of America is the possibly the only country that Iâm aware of that isnât suffering the same rapid decline that the rest of the west is seeing. Bible believing Christians who live in the US are in a much safer place than countries of Europe or Australia, Canada and the rest of the western world. The strong Christian backbone of the US is what makes the difference. Churches in the rest of the worlds countries should take a long hard look at the difference in US Church attendance and Church relevance and learn a valuable lesson that a Christian countries Churches will remain intact for much longer than a secular country. The other places where the trend of church decline is opposite to the most other countries appear to be sub-Saharan Africa and China.
On another note, the narrative by Jim Mason about his journey is relevant here too:
Why Iâm finally a young-earth creationist
by Jim Mason
[copyright text removed by moderator, please see link below for article]
The above article can be found at: https://creation.com/finally-a-creationist
And on an associated but slightly different note see:
God Bless,
jon
Hi Joel,
thank you for your reply post, it is appreciated!
The text in Genesis 1 is abundantly clear enough to me to mean precisely what it plainly says.
The creation sequence from Day 1 to Day 6 is also extremely clear to me and millions of others too.
Why is there a need to impose the latest secular beliefs onto the straightforward Creation account.
What is it that has you not see what I see is so plainly stated?
The Big Bang is a myth that simply doesnât stack up against the Biblical history we are given by our righteous, just and above all truthful Lord God. He stretched out the heavens like a scroll on the fourth day.
Why do you not accept as written, what God has so clearly inspired the author of Genesis to write?
God Bless,
jon
well to me it makes sense if one focuses on exactly why God needed to save us from our sins in the first place.
If ithe wages of sin is death is an allegory, then even common sense begs the questionâŚChrists physical death becomes unecessary and pointless does it not?
And as i said, you were the one who put yourself in this spotâŚit was you who wrote on the forums that a living soul is both physical and spiritual. So you opened the floodgates to your own demise on this one 
BTW i stumbled across the following which impressed meâŚ
âPilgrimâs Progress is an allegory of the spiritual journeyâ (Oxford languages)
Iâve seen that article before. I note that he is a staff member of Creation Ministries International and in that respect just about everything he says in defence of a young earth or in opposition to evolution is repeating the party line parrot fashion. Basically, he is saying what his contract of employment requires him to say. Many of the points that he makes, such as dinosaur soft tissue and radiocarbon in coals and diamonds, have been raised in this discussion and dealt with already.
He makes a lot of noise about the limitations of science. Yes, science has its limitations, and yes, scientific fraud is a thing, but these are not a free pass to let you reject any and every scientific finding that you donât like. In order to show that the earth is young, you need to do far more than just show that scientific fraud is a thing. You need to show that scientific fraud in paleontology and geochronology is pervasive, ubiquitous and tightly coordinated right across the entire disciplines and has been so for more than two hundred years. A handful of examples of casual fraud by individual researchers acting independently of each other falls far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far short of making such a case.
The problem that I have with young earthists with science degrees is that they should reasonably be expected to know these things. They should be expected to know what differentiates good arguments from bad arguments. They should be expected to know how science works in reality, how measurement works, and the mathematical basis behind it all. They should be expected to know that soft tissue is not the same as soft tissue remnants, that DNA breakdown products are not the same as sequenceable DNA, and that contamination is an unavoidable factor in any form of measurement, radiocarbon studies included, that must be correctly taken into account and correctly quantified without either exaggerating or downplaying its extent or significance before claiming that anything out of the ordinary is going on. They should be expected to know that science has rulesârules that do not depend on anyoneâs worldviews but that are the same for Christians and atheists alike. Their advanced education in the sciences puts them in a position of trust within the Church, and for them to make claims that are inconsistent with the rules of science, and inconsistent with things that even a high school student should reasonably be expected to know about science, is a very serious breach of that trust. Iâm sorry if you donât like me, or anyone else, describing such behaviour as lying, but all I can say to that is that if it isnât lying then I donât know what is, and if they donât want to be accused of lying then they should not do such things.
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I absolutely disagree. The text absolutely DOES SAY that in the original.
Perhaps you would be gracious enough to give us all a word by word explanation of Genesis 1 verses 1 to 31 to show us precisely why you disagree that the text does not mean what it plainly states in the various translations; be they KJV, AKJV, NASB, ESV, NIV, OJB, ASV etcâŚ
Thanks,
God Bless,
jon
They do bothâmost mutations are essentially trivial (âyou make 2% more of Protein xyz than your father doesâ, etc.), most of the rarer mutations that make drastic changes are detrimental, but some are beneficial. And mutations create new DNA sequences by definition. Whether they are useful is and entirely separate issue.
The fact that bacteria exist disproves the notion that mutations would prevent humans from having existed for a few hundred thousand years.
Thatâs still contamination.
There are preserved ligaments from clams older than any dinosaur, so no, not all âsoftâ tissue disintegrates rapidly. It usually does, but not always.
It says âthe universe appeared, and here is our best educated guess about howâ How is that counter to the Bible?
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You do realize that the fine tuning of the universal constants you endorsed in your prior post are a feature of Big Bang cosmology? The significance of carbon nuclei having finely tuned resonance is that is what allows for stellar nucleosynthesis, which would not matter if everything was created de novo.
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But isnât it true to say that for every extremely rare (in the visible to natural selection sense) beneficial mutation, there are a million or more neutral or near neutral or outright deleterious mutations that all combined add up to a slowly deteriorating genome, such that every generation of humans for example have accumulated more mutations than their parents. This inexorable continual accumulation in each successive generation of either downright deleterious mutations or noise continues unabated in exactly the OPPOSITE direction that is required if evolution were a reality which it clearly isnât. The microscopically small number of beneficial mutations do not have a snowflakes chance in hell of offsetting the enormous combined weight of neutral and near neutral noise and deleterious mutations that is traveling along the road to eventual extinction.
The ascension of diversity of the species at levels of taxa above species as espoused by evolutionists is wishful thinking, the evidence clearly does not show anything of the sort. An evcyclopaedia that is reprinted time and time again with say a hundred typos in each edition will eventually become unusable through the loss of meaningful specified information; the genome has precisely the same problem, through deletions, substitutions etc. that are passed on each generation and arenât repaired by the sophisticated correction machinery.
But doesnât evolution posit that humans are the end result of an ever increasing complexity of life that started with the first single cell billions of years ago?
Thatâs what you may like to believe but the truth of the matter is that I do not see why proper procedures were not rigorously adhered to in the professional labs that have found C14 inside diamonds that by their very crystal lattice structure are virtually impossible to contaminate with atmospheric or soluble C14. The cry of contamination is really just clutching at straws simply because the alternative does not align with your worldview of âdeep timeâ.
Do you really hear what you are saying here?
Surely, donât you understand that the basic laws of chemistry and physics preclude any possibility of preservation for such an enormous period of time? The chemical bonds between the atoms in the complex organic compounds would have completely disintegrated millions upon millions upon millions of years ago, in fact not very long in âsupposed geologic time termsâ after the animal died!
Thus the only sane explanation is to believe the Bible, the dinosaur bones are thousands of years old, NOT 65 to 300 million. It should be obvious, but again the rigorous empirical science reality is ignored and a just so story is made up to accommodate yet another inconvenient scientific FACT, to retain belief in, you guessed it evolution, which must be retained at all costs. WHY?
Evolution is at odds with science and it is at odds with the Bible, so WHY retain it?
Throw it away, it is a false belief framework that doesnât fit what we empirically see in the real world.
Wasnât it the British mathematician/astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle who originated the famous illustration comparing the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that âa tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials thereinâ.
You got that right, âguessâ is the operational word here.
Why not just take our Lord and Saviourâs word for it?
The heavens were rolled out by Him as if they were a scroll.
Do we really need to attach such importance to best guesses of fallen man; what we do know about the universe is that it is big, very big, that is sufficient for me to understand the majesty and glory of our Lord God who made it all.
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An informative article about this is at: Big bang critic dies (Fred Hoyle)
An excerpt is below:
Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1915, Hoyle was one of Britainâs best-known mathematicians and astronomers in the last half of the 20th century. He spent decades searching for answers to questions of the origins of life and the origin and age of the universe. In the 1940s, he, along with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, proposed the âsteady stateâ theory, a belief that the universe had no beginning or end, but always existed and would continue to exist.
All these men were strong humanists, so they rejected any theory that seemed to teach a beginning for the universe, because that would point to a Beginnerâsee the discussion in If God created the universe, then who created God? Their bias was so strong that they were even prepared to violate the fundamental Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy, which states that mass/energy in the universe can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, this fundamental law is consistent with GenesisâGodâs creation of the space-time universe was finished after six days. But the Steady State Theory posits a continual spontaneous appearance of hydrogen atoms from nothing.
But because the evidence of the rapid expansion of the universe exceeded the predictions of Hoyleâs theory, and because of the reluctance to believe that fundamental laws were violated, many astronomers began to postulate that an explosion of highly dense matter was the beginning of all space and time. In his 1950 BBC radio series, The Nature of the Universe, Hoyle mockingly called this idea the âbig bang,â considering it preposterous.2 Yet the theoryâand the derisive termâhave become mainstream, not only in astronomy but in society as well.
Hoyle readily saw through the fallacious assumptions behind the âbig bangâ theory. In 1994 he wrote, âBig-Bang cosmology refers to an epoch that cannot be reached by any form of astronomy, and, in more than two decades, it has not produced a single successful prediction.â3 Even though many people currently consider cosmic microwave background radiation a successful prediction of the âbig bang,â this is very shaky, and would fit better with Dr Russ Humphreysâ cosmological model that involves God having stretched out the cosmos (Isaiah 42:5).
This should be a lesson to âbig-bangâ apologists, who are seduced by its apparent teaching of a beginning of the universe and simply ignore the contradictions with Godâs Word. What happens to their apologetic framework if the secular astronomical community goes along with Hoyle after all, and rejects the âbig bangâ? Then the âbig-bangâ apologists would need to reinterpret their reinterpretations of Genesis! See also What are some of the problems with the Big Bang theory?
Also, commenting on the general state of mainstream cosmology, Hoyle and several colleagues wrote, âCosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on very few facts. The strong tendency is to replace a need for more facts by conformity.â4
References
- Sullivan, W., Fred Hoyle dies at 86; opposed âbig bangâ but named it, <www.nytimes.com/2001/08/22/obituaries/22HOYL.html>, August 22, 2001.
- Clayton, J., excerpt from The Source, http://howardpublishing.com/Books/Books/Chapters/thesource.htm, August 22, 2001.
- Hoyle, F., Home Is Where the Wind Blows, University Science Books, Mill Valley, California, 414, 1994, as reported in The Skeptic, 16(1):52.
- Arp, H.C., Burbidge, G., Hoyle, F., Narlikar, J.V. and Wickramasinghe, N.C., The extragalactic universe: an alternative view, Nature **346:**807â812, August 30, 1990.
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The photos from the space telescopes are awe inspiring and cause me to praise the ONE who made it all.
I am so very small and insignificant that I can only just begin to comprehend the awesome power and incomprehensible brilliance of the One who made it all and shake with reverence and fear at His power over all of Creation and time, yet all praise be to Him, I know that He loves me and that is an amazing fact I donât fully understand.
God Bless,
jon
No, itâs not true to say that. There are indeed far more neutral and deleterious mutations than beneficial ones (especially neutral ones, at least for humans). The neutral ones accumulate indefinitely while (with rare exceptions) the deleterious ones are eliminated by natural selection.
Why would you need beneficial mutations to counter the effect of neutral mutations? The latter donât affect fitness, by definition, so thereâs no effect to counter. Then thereâs the separate idea that nearly neutral but very slightly deleterious mutations, ones that have so small an effect that selection canât eliminate them, are gradually degrading genomes. This is Sanfordâs âgenetic entropyâ. Itâs wrong â itâs contradicted by a bunch of empirical data, has zero evidence in support of it, and makes no sense at all on theoretical grounds.
By the way, you still havenât told us why genetic differences between species look so much like accumulated mutations.
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The facts I stated (thin crispy curst of continents, and earth orbiting the nearest star) are not âlatest secular beliefs.â Creation is pretty clear about this.
Peace and Christian love,
Joel
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You can say it, but it isnât true.
This falsehood does not become true by repetition. Your C14 in diamonds is a just so story.
If dinosaurs remains were only 4500 years old, we would have carcasses, perhaps trillions and trillions of them as you like to say. Speaking of which, if all the dinosaur kinds were really on the ark, where can we go see some living exhibits?
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Since @Burrawang is ignoring me (I suspect through his Discourse preferences), I shall refer to him in the third person and address my remarks to the other participants in this thread from this point forward. If anyone thinks any benefit would come from drawing my comments to his attention, I have no objection.
He asks why proper procedures were not rigorously adhered to. Well, for starters, if youâre dismissing contamination as a âcryâ that âis really just clutching at straws simply because the alternative does not align with your worldviewâ, that is not adhering to proper procedures.
Yes, proper procedures make every effort to reduce contamination to a minimum as far as is possible within technological and budgetary constraints. But proper procedures also recognise that that minimum is not zero. Proper procedures also account for total contamination from all possible vectorsâin situ contamination, instrument background, sample preparation, collection and storage, and possibly even factors that may have been poorly studied or even overlooked. Proper procedures recognise that eliminating contamination is easy to get wrong and difficult to get right, and that it is therefore reasonable to allow an extra margin to account for mistakes or poor laboratory technique. Proper procedures recoginse that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that the suggestion that hundreds of thousands if not millions of other, well established, high quality data points could all be consistently out by up to six orders of magnitude is a textbook example of such an extraordinary claim. Proper procedures recognise that tiny samples with huge error bars, or disputed or ambiguous results from techniques pushed right to the limits of their sensitivity, do not constitute extraordinary evidence.
And Iâm sorry, but âwhat you may like to believeâ or âworldviews of âdeep timeââ have nothing whatsoever to do with it. This is simply how measurement works in every area of science, âoperationalâ and âhistoricalâ alike.
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That video is both detailed and very good (although he does miss an important point about genetic load). Itâs difficult to argue with Sanford because his statements about facts are just so thoroughly wrong. (Particularly amusing is his claim that population geneticists were the darlings of biology. In reality, until fairly recently they were largely considered irrelevant because their theoretical models couldnât be tested; as a result, they tended to be a surly lot.)
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