Two challenges from a YEC professor

Faith & Science Conversation
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Specific eruptions of specific volcanoes is not even relevant…that is not debated by either side…they already agree on that point.

The point is, those same millions of years arguments were thrown in chaos when studies were performed on the Mt St Hellens event. That event clearly demonstrated that signficant events like volcanic ones can cause massive geological changes in a few weeks…not millions of years! A global tectonic event such as that of the Biblical flood would easily produce global changes…and that was the point in the Bible narrative, God decided to destroy everything and start over. The difference the second time around was Noah and his family and some of the animals were preserved in the ark. If He (God) spoke it all into existence originally, is this really a problem for an Almighty God as claimed by TEism?

It stuns me that Christians do not agree with the bible narrative and still think they can be Christian. If they do not believe what the Bible states, then they do not believe the Bible. If they do not believe the Bible, what world view are they following exactly…its certainly not Christianity.

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None that I know of. Mt. St. Helens was not even one of the largest events geologists have studied for many years.
I, and other TEs 9or ECs to use the preferred term), believe in the Bible. We just believe you mis-interpret it and are wrong in believing it supports a young earth.

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That’s exactly my issue with YECists: they do not agree with what Genesis teaches but instead demand that God have conformed to their modern uniformed worldview instead of speaking to the people of the time in terms those people could understand. YECism is idolatry because it refuses to treat the scriptures as the ancient literature they are and sets up a modern scientific materialistic worldview instead of studying the scriptures with the worldview(s) of the various authors and the different types of literature those authors used.

YECism makes the very same mistake that Roman Catholicism has made more than once: forcing the scriptures to fit a temporary human worldview. That mistake has always at the very least distorted the Gospel and at worst resulted in false teaching, for the simple reason that ding so always pushes Christ off center and replaces Him with human philosophy.

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If you are interested in taking the time to read a contrarian point of view. Try this Walt Brown’s Hydroplate theory
If interested I would encourage you to go straight to the source rather than opinions of others.
In addition to putting forth his own theory there are his comments on the current paradigms.
Read all of part II, including endnotes, relevant FAQ, and the technical notes. Long read, but worth it.

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I have been aware of the hydroplate theory for some time. Even most YEC organizations have disassociated themselves from this idea.

I appreciate your making the suggestion, but please do not take it personally that I have no interest in delving deeper into what I consider hopelessly misbegotten.

Take a bucket of water. Take a regular rock. Put it in the bucket. It sinks. We are done with hydroplate theory. Is it more complicated than that?? All right, geologists are on it - there is plenty of science to go along with common sense. We have a well established, deeply researched, discipline of geology, including aquifers, that permits nothing like any subterranean oceans such as envisioned by Walt Brown. Hydroplate theory ranks with perpetual motion, vapor canopies, and the healing power of crystal pyramids for unadulterated nonsense. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth is more plausible.

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YECism is a modern view yes, but there are quite a number within the Evangelical movement that see Catholicism as a corruption of Christianity. Indeed some evangelicals see Catholicism as anti-Christian because of its links to Constantine. Whilst he was said to have converted, it is very clear from history that his conversion was largely self-serving and he maintained many pagan practices despite his apparent conversion and these practices infiltrated the subsequent Christian movement that formed out of it.

The point is, Constantine recognized the need to combine church and state in order to protect his empire (to maintain complete control of it). It was a masterful stroke actually, however, it corrupted the Christian movement in that region.

On the statement you make YECism is idolatry…you have no support for that argument. I challenge you to support that with Bible passages please and if and when you do, I am extremely confident I can provide self explanatory Bible passages that refute any twisted interpretations of scripture which supposedly support your views on this.

I can preempt and start with the following:

What is the overall theme of the Bible? Creation, The Fall, Redemption, and Restoration back to its former glory (none of these support evolutionary models because evolution says death existed before the fall of man…the bible does not support this view and specifically says the opposite Romans 5:12
12Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.

What is the purpose of the Earthly Sanctuary? To Explain the above and illustrate a physical building and religious model given by Moses that is most definately historical fact and not an allegory. If Christ died a physical death for the atonement of sins, and the wages of sin are death, does this not agree with Genesis Chapter 3 as being a real event? If Genesis Chapter 3 is a real event, how can you make the claim that the books of Moses are allegorical? You make the claim because scientific interpretation disagrees with the Mosaic account (that is twisting of scripture my friend)!

Was Christ’s death on the cross physical? Obviously yes. So why then the claim that the wages of sin is death means only spiritual death? Clearly, that is false given Christ died physically on the Cross, Physically rose again, and physically ascended into heaven 6 weeks later.

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So when a Christian dies it is the result of her sins? Sins that we are told are forgiven when she accepts Christ. As Christians we are only promised to not have to experience spiritual death. A second death that is the result of unforgiven sin.

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This covers the nonsense pretty well:

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Yes, but there is more.

Brown characterizes his subterranean oceans as supercritical water. Supercritical fluids have some unusual properties, but an aspect of the basic idea is quite accessible. If you heat liquid water, its density will decrease, as is readily seen in an old style thermometer. Steam is a compressible gas, and as you increase the pressure, its density will increase. Eventually, you add enough heat and pressure, and the density of steam and of liquid water become identical. Gas and liquid become indistinguishable, and there can be no interface. This is a forth state of matter, and fluid supercriticallity is not that rare in process engineering.

If liquid water could not provide support for Earth’s crust, the situation is so much worse with supercritical water.

One, liquid water is relatively incompressible compared to supercritical water. which is still approximated by the idea gas law. That means supercritical water provides essentially no mechanical support countering gravity, for the vast overburden between any pillars.

Two, the viscosity of supercritical water is an order of magnitude less than liquid water. It would wedge between microscopic crystals, and any minute fissure or fault would be like a freeway. There could be no rock or mineral which would be impervious to the progressive ingression of supercritical water, even before tidal deformations. Structural loss of integrity of the crust would probably happen before the serpent was done with Eve.

That hydroplate theory gained traction with even a fringe of YEC is a demonstration of just how sciency sounding language can sadly bamboozle a trusting audience.

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Oh, come on – you’re not so dense as to take an example as the argument. The point is that those volcanic eruptions and their results demonstrate that your category of “similar” is meaningless in terms of conclusions; similarity only points to places for study/investigation.

St. Helens didn’t throw anything into chaos except for people without even high school understanding of geology.

A global tectonic event such as YECers put forward would have melted the entire Earth – which anyone who has actually studied mass movements of earth in volcanoes and other causes would know.

It’s a problem for a God that can be trusted because it involves multitudes of meaningless miracles

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Mt. St. Helens was noteworthy for how it erupted, not for the size of the eruption; not many eruptions result in a third or more of the mountain being blown across a large chunk of a continent. It was also noteworthy because it served as a wake-up call for all the communities in the U.S. Pacific Northwest that are in the shadows of other volcanoes.

That and it showed that magma chambers are not so isolated as was thought; there was activity on several other volcanoes that totally subsided once St. Helens blew, including one in downtown Portland that had been considered extinct.

But huge? No, we in the Pacific NW know it was just mid-range.

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Seen it, read it, laughed most of the way through, cried some – laughed because it is scientifically so silly, cried because there are people who will believe that nonsense.

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Young earth creationism in its modern form is indeed often idolatry. In Galatians, Paul strongly warns against making anything besides the gospel central. Yet creation science judges not by whether one shows credible evidence of faith in Christ and repentance from sin, but whether one uncritically accepts whatever claims are put out by one’s favorite creation scientists. Young-earth organizations and advocates frequently support non-Christian religious groups that are willing to buy into aspects of their bad scientific claims, while demonizing Christians who point out problems with their views.

Jesus warned about placing the traditions of men above the commandments of God. Yet young-earth creationism does not hesitate to place “You shall promote a young earth” ahead of “You shall not bear false witness.” Attention to quality and consistency is quite rare. Admitting “this is not a good argument” is uncommon, and sometimes incorporates further misrepresentation. (For example, before the ugly divorce with CMI, AiG had a list of arguments not to use that included the moon dust myth, but the explanation of why it wasn’t so good contained the lie that young earthers had examined new evidence and reached the conclusion that there were problems while citing old earthers pointing out evidence available when the moon dust story was first invented.)

Young-earth creationism creates a god working only in certain ways specified by them, rather than accepting that God is greater than we understand and trying to understand the evidence of how He actually does work.

Romans 7:4 continues the argument from 5:12, stating that Christians have died to the Law. Yet you aren’t physically dead. Adam and Eve did not immediately keel over upon sinning. More generally, the Bible is much more focused on spiritual rather than physical death. And even some young-earth advocates admit that not having any animals dying before the Fall is not practical (would an elephant never step on a bug? how do Adam and Eve make any sense of the warning about death without the example of physical death of animals?) Before modern young earth creationism made “no physical death before the fall” a theological principle in support of a young earth, there was consideration of the possibility by many writers. Athanasius, the champion of Nicene orthodoxy, proposed that an unfallen human would experience something similar to a peaceful death in order to transition from earthly to heavenly life. Aquinas strongly doubted that carnivores would have been herbivorous before the Fall. Calvin doubted whether Genesis 1:30 could be pressed into showing that carnivory did not happen before the Fall, though he tended to accept that position.

Also, if animal death is inherently bad, that runs into problems with God providing food to the lions and ravens in Ps. 104 (which seems to be a reflection on the creation) and especially with the fact of Jesus eating fish and meat.

Note that seeing the garden of Eden as an earthly sanctuary does not require that the area outside the garden be as safe as inside. Ruling and subduing the earth was not a task to be achieved from an armchair.

Of course, one could hold a young-earth position without making an idol of it. But the young-earth movement is so resistant to self-examination as to make it difficult.

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“Similar” layers may be formed in two basic ways. First is if conditions are similar in the two places. For example, the Coconino Sandstone and the Navajo Sandstone in the southwestern US are similar-looking because both are made from desert sand dunes, buried and cemented together. But they have different fossils and the layers above and below them are different - they formed in two different deserts at different times. Similar layers are found widely around the globe because they were formed under similar conditions. Flood geology is also based on this premise, but assumes that one can claim that a global flood produced any possible conditions.

There are also widespread layers that match not just in the general features but in details of specific features - types of fossils, geochemistry, etc. These actually represent single events that affected a large area. Of course, a global flood would be a single event affecting a wide area. But there are myriad events affecting wide areas. Volcanic eruptions, for example, can be detected through widespread ancient ash layers that have distinctively matching chemical signals and are associated with the same kinds of fossils. But if a catastrophic global flood were happening, the ash should have been all mixed in with everything else, not settling out as a distinctive layer. Only calm conditions for many days would allow the ash to settle out into a layer. Kinds of planktonic microfossils change from layer to layer. They must have a chance to spread around the globe and live and die and pile up to make a layer characterized by having particular species. Hundreds of layers can be recognized in this way. There are layers like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that are distinguished by a brief global extreme in stable isotopes. Again, those must spread around the globe and get deposited without mixing with the stuff below or above. Intervals such as the mid-Ordovician or end-Cretaceous have spikes in material from an extraterrestrial source.

There are layers that are widespread because they formed on a supercontinent, such as the “Great unconformity” on the eroding surface of Rodinia or the many Paleozoic layers that can be recognized across Gondwana.

But none of the widespread layers match what should be produced by a single global flood.

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The energy involved is actually high enough to turn the entire earth into a ball of plasma. Add in hyper-speed radiometric decay, and that ball of plasma (formerly earth) is emitting more X-rays than the rest of the galaxy combined.

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Did this event produce lake varves with alternating diatom and clay layers where the insect and leaf debris caught in each varve had less and less 14C as you moved down in depth, like that found in Lake Suigetsu?

Did this event produce chalk hundreds of feet deep like that seen in the cliffs at Dover?

Did this event produce deposits hundreds to thousands of meters thick composed almost entirely of broken up bits of crinoids?

Did this event produce thick sediments of fine grained clay?

All you have is layers of coarse volcanic sediments. Geologists have no problem accepting that these can be laid down quickly in a catastrophic lahar. Mt. St. Helens did nothing to rock the boat of geology.

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Especially when they are being fed a line that makes them feel falsely noble for “upholding the scriptures”.

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That’s true of how they address the scriptures as well: rather than looking at the ancient literature it is and asking, “Which kind is this and what was it for?”, they start with the attitude that it was all written three generations ago in modern English with a modern Western worldview – which means they aren’t actually reading the scriptures!

Psalm 104 is an interesting piece of writing since it alternates with stating something done in Creation/providence and what is observable now. Just grabbing a random bit:

The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has her home in the fir trees.

It alternates from the trees being watered (present) to God planting the trees (creation/providence) to the birds building their nests (present).

Oh, quite so! This is why Orthodox theology puts Eden in our future rather than in our past; Eden was never a place to stay in to stay safe, it was a “headquarters” from which God’s representatives could venture forth to shape the whole Earth into a similar ordered state (not to trash it, as too many Christians these days think) – and so that global Eden is still in our future, and we at present are being shaped to take on that job eventually; as some ancient writers would put it, we as Christians are being turned into human beings so that we are fit to be in the image of God (where “image of God” is a status, an “office” in the old sense of the word, not a condition.

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I wish I could remember where it was, but I recall in volcanology examining lake deposits in a highway cut through a hill and estimating how long ash kept falling by the inclusions, and in fact determining what time of year it fell by comparing it to other lake deposits

Almost makes me wish I’d spent another year at university to catch another couple Geology sequences…

I remember hiking down Havasu Canyon with some YECers in the group, looking at the sediments they were pointing to as happening in just days, and trying to convince myself that there might be some remote possibility they had a clue what they were talking about – and then lamenting (to myself) just how much of the glory of Creation they missed by holding that narrow view.

As was said often on an old favorite TV show, “Holy crap!”

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Nope, nor did it produce layers that show differences in what gets deposited by season, which are easy to find in lakes where sediment layers are thick.

Chalk . . . nope, even the ash after sorting by stream action into layers of different densities, nothing that looked like ash,

I haven’t hiked St. Helens itself yet, but I’ve hiked areas close enough that the ash deposits were thick and obvious in forests, meadows, ponds, and streams, and to anyone with just freshman and sophomore university geology sequences under their belts will mistake them for anything but what they are.