As I suspected, Dr. Lisle is a “Relativist”. Source for that claim: Lisle’s 2018 book: “The Physics of Einstein”.
Specifically, Page 8.
“And motion, being a change in position over time, is therefore only meaningful when compared to something else. Imagine that the only thing in the universe is a single rock. We then ask the question, “Is that rock stationary or in motion?” The question is unanswerable because there is nothing with which to compare the rock. If the universe had ttwo rocks, then we can ask if they are in motion relative to each other. However, without a reference frame, mottiion has no meaning.”
The initial question has some merit, but is misused by young-earthers as an excuse to insist that you have to believe their claims no matter how wrong they are.
“It takes faith in Christ to see His truth.” There is truth to this assertion - Paul states that the gospel seems to be nonsense to unbelievers. But Paul also appealed to the Athenians on the basis of what they could see in creation. Everyone can see some of Christ’s truths. You don’t have to be a Christian to tell that God made water to boil at 373.15 K under 1 atmosphere pressure. You don’t have to be a Christian to figure out that theft and murder cause problems. You need to avoid the genetic fallacy, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in his essay “Horrid Red Things”. The essay gives the example of a child who says “Don’t eat that - it’s poison! It has horrid red things in it.” Although the child’s grasp of chemistry and physiology appears to be rather limited, that is not a good reason to eat the substance in question.
"A person’s worldview tells him how to interpret the evidence.” This is true by definition - a worldview provides an overall context for interpreting evidence. But this does not provide a good justification for young-earth claims. First, this claim is not applied consistently. Young earthers (and ID advocates) routinely claim to be just looking at the science and discovering that it supports their position. If that were true, then anyone with a worldview that calls for serious consideration of scientific evidence would reach the same conclusion. But when someone points out that serious consideration of the scientific evidence actually contradicts the young-earth or anti-evolution claim, then it is asserted that it’s because the young-earther has the right worldview and the old-earther is being atheistic. Honest application of this point would lead to the admission that young-earth claims are based on their worldview, not on the scientific evidence. Also, there is a very serious theological error, because this is claiming that you are a Christian if you buy into young-earth claims, not based on whether you have put your faith in Christ and repented from sin. As Paul points out in Galatians, such additions to the gospel rapidly become substitute false gospels.
Secondly, a problem arises when anything comes up that does not seem to fit with the worldview. How do you handle that? Do you simply dismiss it, denying that anything could possibly not fit your worldview, or do you carefully examine the problem to try to work out where the difficulty lies? The young-earth movement overwhelmingly takes the approach of denial. Anything that doesn’t fit a young-earth model is rejected; anything apparently supporting a young-earth position is uncritically accepted no matter how ridiculous it is. Changing your worldview at every turn is not a good idea - an apparent minor problem is not enough to show that a system that holds up well in general should be thrown out. But if the problem cannot be solved, or if there are a lot of big problems, then the worldview probably needs some work. In the case of a young-earth position, all relevant scientific evidence points to an ancient earth. This was suspected by the late 1600’s and conclusively shown by the 1770’s. An honest young earth position must admit that it does not fit with what we can tell from science.
Another problem with Lisle’s cosmic anisotropy model is that, if the speed of light coming towards an observer is infinite, then we should see things as they are right now. But if we look across long distances astronomically, we start to see things looking less and less like our vicinity in space and more like a plausible earlier state. If Lisle’s model were true, we should not see the cosmic microwave background but instead we should see distant galaxies as they are today.
All truth is God’s truth–of course. The question is, what is the truth about the age of the universe? When deep time advocates look at the evidence in the universe, they see evidence for deep time. When YEC look at the evidence, they see evidence of a universe less than 10,000 years old. “God’s truth” is not the sole province of deep time advocates. You have hidden your conclusion in your premise.
Where does this “befitting an eternal God” argument come from? That is kind of a silly argument–from either old earth or young earth perspective, the universe was at one time 6,000 years old, and even one day old. In the deep time perspective, was it then not befitting an eternal God? What percentage of eternal is either 6000 years or 15 billion years? The answer is the same for both: zero percent.
Actually, they don’t. They deceive themselves based on a flawed human interpretation of the Bible and twist what the evidence says to fit, misinterpreting it as well. Truth comes from reality, from the Bible and from creation.
Sorry Craig, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the age of the universe is determined by measuring things. And you cannot look at a set of measurements in two different ways and get two different results that differ by a factor of two million. Measurement simply does not work like that.
Or let’s put it this way. You can look at Mount Everest from base camp and see a massive humungous mountain that dwarfs everyone looking at it. Or you can look at it from an aeroplane and see just a tiny bump on the landscape. But either way, if you measure its height, you will get the same result: 8,848 metres.
I do not know of any deep time advocates. You may be referring to scientists.
Evidence favors a conclusion. It is not neutral, and therefore is not a matter of presupposition. The most basic fact about the universe is simply its scale. There are all sorts of YEC interpretations to account for the age implications of distant star light, but that is not a problem to begin with and does not need “interpreting”. You can see Andromeda a couple of million light years away, with you unaided eyes - no interpretation required. You do not need an expert to realize the age implications of pictures of gravitationally interacting galaxies, the example photograph @jammycakes provided is just one of hundreds. There is a big difference in following the evidence and attempting to lead the evidence. These cannot be framed as equivalent.
The real question, IMO, is how do we determine truth. Do we follow the method used by Answers in Genesis?
Is truth reliably found by dogmatically adhering to an interpretation of scripture while ignoring observations from the creation itself?
That’s not how it works. We don’t see significant amounts of lead in zircons because we believe the Earth is old. We don’t measure a 4.5 billion year half life for uranium-238 because we believe in an old Earth. We don’t observe that zircons exclude lead when they form because we believe in an old Earth.
You are using reason, logic, and evidence to arrive at that conclusion.
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”–Galileo Galilei
In Galileo’s time they thought day and night was caused by the Sun moving around the Earth. The clergy of the time also believed that the Bible clearly stated that the Earth was stationary and that the Sun moved about it. Galileo was put on trial for challenging the truth that the clergy claimed came from the Bible.
“First, . . . to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth . . . revolves with great speed about the sun . . . is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
It is worth mentioning that the Earth’s orbit is elliptical which means the distance between the Earth and Sun changes by millions of miles over one orbit.
Alas, no. Trying to force together two completely different understandings of the cosmos is a dead-end. The attempt will inevitably lead nowhere, except to confusion and disappointment.
Instead, when reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) imagine the picture below. This is how they understood the cosmos. It makes sense in its own terms. For instance, you’ll see that the earth is pictured as flat, as that is what they (mostly) imagined it to be. (The idea of a curved or spherical earth was beginning to emerge in Egypt and Greece at bout the same time, but was in its infancy.) But this view, held by the writers and editors of scripture, we now know to be incompatible with what subsequent discoveries (including that Egyptian/Greek discovery of curvature of the earth) has revealed.
it is quite fruitless trying to force together these notions into some sort of “Grand Unified Truth”. it can’t be done because they are fundamentally incompatible.
Instead, gain a deeper understanding of how scripture came to be as it is from its own day.
My “point” was that if they don’t “profit” from the words of non-YEC Christians, what’s the probability that a self-acknowledged atheist would have anything of importance to say. 2 + 2 is among the things that kids learn in the 1st grade. Granted, I don’t know everything about everything, but … I’ve never heard of many public elementary school teachers self-acknowledging their religious beliefs–much less their atheistic beliefs–at the beginning of a school year.
