Two questions about how central the question of origins is to your core beliefs

As do you if you accept Heliocentrism.

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What is fraudulent at this website?

It seems you are just avoiding the evidence.

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Dear T aquaticus,
no I am not avoiding anything, but when I see a document that includes reference to work by Ernst Haeckel, I am immediately on edge, because it is a well proven fact that Haeckel intentionally committed fraud to further societies acceptance of evolution when the church was still uncompromised and belief in the Bible as faithful Truth was a given.

God bless,
jon

That part is true.

There need not be any mechanism to preserve biodiversity, because the history of the planet is one of continuity and that does not include a global flood. So no problem.

The objective of creationist organizations is not research, which consists mainly of reading the work of scientists to find what they can misrepresent. Creation research contributes squat to actual discovery.

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The Bible says nothing about heterozygosity, or Genus level kinds like you said. Animals are always referred by their common names which correspond to modern species.

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You referenced Haeckel, so should I be upset too?

Did you even look at any of the evidence, or did you search for Haeckel and throw a fit as an excuse for ignoring the material? Did you actually read what the webpage says about Haeckel?

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It doesn’t cost any money to make stuff up, which is what these creationist organizations are doing.

Modern geology includes catastrophic processes. It always has. Finding sediments caused by catastrophic processes does not evidence a global flood nor a recent flood. It just evidences a catastrophic process somewhere in Earth’s history. Do you think they had telephone polls during Noah’s time?

image

Given your inability to address the evidence, I don’t see how you can claim it isn’t well understood by actual scientists. Your refusal to understand the evidence is your problem, not the problem of science.

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Stated without justification given a turbulent sea. Typical of YEC ad hoc to patch up inconsistencies in their own ideas.

As a courtesy, please refrain from suggesting videos to me to watch, especially ones only tangentially pertainent to the topic under discussion. I prefer to read, as it is much more time efficient, and I can quickly determine if the content is worthwhile or SOSO.

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Sorry, but that’s science fiction, not the Bible. From a biblical perspective, “genus” is a word with no meaning, and “kind” is a word with no scientific meaning.
Stop forcing a MSWV on the text!

More science fiction.

Further science fiction.

The fact that you insist that the Holy Spirit was required to make things easy for you in your modern scientific worldview does not make “kind” a scientific term.

To put it politely . . . absolute rubbish. “Variant” is a biological term, and in botany at least it does not apply to species. The above is such nonsense it is difficult to even address.

Yes – you hold the worldview that says the modern scientific understanding of things is so correct that the Holy Spirit had to force His chosen writers to use it millennia ago even though they would have had no possibility of understanding it. Most people here hold a worldview that says that God, being humble and wanting all to come to a knowledge of the truth, spoke to people through the ways that would work best with them, which means that it is necessary to actually study the scriptures before trying to be a teacher.

Yes, it is – what YEC does with the word and what the Hebrew means are not at all the same.
YEC holds science as an idol that commands even the scriptures, and so repeatedly tries to force scientific meaning into words that have none.

Or Nephilim?

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This thread [edit: the end, after it went wildly off-topic] masterfully shows how inconsistent flood geology is. While young-earthers begin by saying that a bunch of things buried in sediment is exactly what you’d expect a global flood to produce, the moment one looks closer, every detail belies that explanation.

Looking closer at the sediments, all sorts of layers speak of dry conditions or slow, calm deposition – or are carved and shaped by features that could only form after rock had been dewatered and compacted. None of that looks like what one would expect from a flood, but perhaps God miraculously arranged things that way.

Looking closer at the fossils, they’re arranged in a sequence that doesn’t follow any combination of size, density or mobility. Pollen and their respective plants begin at the same point. Creatures burrow, eat, mate, brood over young and make winding trails all through what are supposed to be flood layers. Again, not what we’d expect a global flood to do, but perhaps God created all the right havens for these things to happen and guided animals and plants to die in an order that looks like evolutionary succession.

Then there’s the matter of what was preserved on the ark and what was not. Apparently God arranged for the flood to be violent enough to not allow a single bird or land reptile or mammal to survive on any of the floating vegetation mats. But at the same time, some of those mats were protected so that every kind of invertebrate and most types of vegetation could continue without needing to be on the ark. Similarly, the waters were placid enough to allow pockets of fresh water to remain unmixed at the surface for creatures who need it while being violent enough to cause most of the geological features worldwide generally attributed to eons of local floods, volcanoes and tectonic plate movements.

In the end, rather than the world looking exactly as one would expect if a global flood happened, countless observed details require adding more miracles or more acts of divine providence that the Bible makes no mention of.

After all that, I’m left wondering why God commanded Noah to build an ark. In this thread, we’ve seen floating vegetation mats grow into floating islands that are “twenty five to fifty feet thick and included soil and remained somewhat intact, above the maelstrom below them.” With those, there’s no need for an ark. There’s no need to cram everything into a boat and scale up kinds to the genus level: these mats provide as much room as can be imagined. Obviously God can preserve all the right things and eliminate all the wrong things just using these amazing floating islands.

Young-earthers are quick to ask local flood advocates why Noah’s family and the animals didn’t just move. But they’re open to the same question: why didn’t Noah’s family and the ark animals just hitch a ride on the floating mats along with all the other living things that survived that way? They claim a local flood makes building an ark unnecessary, but so does their version of a global flood with life-preserving floating islands. A simple response would be “God said to build an ark so Noah obeyed,” except that they reject that answer from local flood advocates.

In order to defend their interpretation of Genesis, modern young-earthers end up creating a flood that bears little resemblance to the one in Genesis while also not resembling the story told by the earth itself. I know I’m not adding anything with this post that hasn’t already been said in more detail by others. I’m appreciative of all who have put time into those detailed answers. I have no idea how many will read much of this thread, but those who do are unlikely to come away thinking that flood geology fits the Bible or the planet.

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It’s telling that AiG put someone in charge who is not a scientist and not a theologian – that guarantees that their head honcho isn’t capable of noticing that they peddle lies right and left and center. It’s commendable that he can preach competently purely on the basis of an English translation, but that doesn’t make him competent as either scientist or theologian.

They want massive turbulence and extensive calm at the same time and fail to see the problem. It’s like stating that a car is moving at 100mph but rejecting the statement that things appear to be flashing past rapidly.

This is circular reasoning.

And science fiction wishful thinking.

From places that aren’t new volcanic islands.

That would be a gross assumption that no one could possibly know.

Why is it that YEC happily makes up outlandish stories that are pure speculation yet reject stories based on actual evidence?

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So do those who are trying to show you your errors. The difference is that you exhibit the attitude that you are a pope who is infallible, and that you reject any effort to ask what the writer intended and the original audience understood by the message.

Science fiction – none of that is from scripture.
Why do you insist that the Bible is a science text? Where in the scriptures does it say it intends to teach us science?

On the scale of the conjectured movements you list, the turbulence would have propagated right up to the surface. Move a few rocks at 30mph under the ocean and the surface isn’t bothered; move continents and you’ll get massive turmoil including things like mile-deep whirlpools.

And that the Earth is a planet instead of a disk.
And that the sky is not a solid dome.

Why do you insult millions upon millions of honest faithful Christians? YEC beliefs are a recent development, unless you want to count the folks who looked at the scriptures and saw there an agreement with the science of their day – that everything was made of the four elements air, earth, fire, and water, and that the Earth was in the center with the sun and planets going around it. They were just as certain as you are about your science being found in the Bible, and they even stuck closer to the literal statements of the text! After all, Genesis 1 plainly shows those four elements! and the Torah is clear that the sun is a small light that goes around the earth!

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And right there the idolatry is exposed: rather than just declare that God suspended a lot of natural law, they continue to try to pound the text to fit a modern scientific container.

And is thus made to be a trickster, not a faithful being.

Good point! That way each major ecosystem could have its own floating mat that could have ended up in just the right place to settle in and thrive when it came to ground!

And thus throw out a huge part of the story’s message.

Which is why I keep referring to it as science fiction. I suppose I ought to also call it theological fiction to cover the lack of fit with Genesis.

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Dear T_aquaticus

Absolute nonsense!
Perhaps you would gain some insight by reading the accurate and informative article at:

A relevant excerpt from that article is below:

Some have argued that models requiring a moving earth must be wrong because the Bible teaches that it is stationary. For example, Psalm 96 reads:

“Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns! Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity.” (Psalm 96:10).

Similarly, Psalm 104 says of God:

“He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.” (Psalm 104:5).

Others respond that there is no need to interpret such verses in this way. In Psalm 96:10, the context relates to God’s reign over humanity, not the physical condition of the earth. Also, the Hebrew word translated ‘moved’ in Psalm 96 is also used in Psalm 16 (where it is translated ‘shaken’):

“I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.” (Psalm 16:8).

Clearly the Bible is not teaching here that those who keep their eyes on God will never move in a physical sense.

In Psalm 104, the language, generally, is poetic rather than literal. For example, it states that “The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment” and “He makes the clouds his chariot”. Hence the context indicates that there is no need to understand verse 5 as scientific statement describing the physical condition of the earth.

Some have argued that the Bible teaches that the sun cannot be stationary. The book of Ecclesiastes and the book of Joshua, they say, clearly teach that the sun moves:

“The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises” (Ecclesiastes 1:5).

“At that time Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, ‘Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day” (Joshua 10:12–13).

Others argue that there is, again, no conflict here between the Bible and science. They say that, in these passages, the Bible is using the ‘language of appearance’ (phenomenological language), just as scientists do today when they speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. Alternatively, this language acknowledges that all motion must be described with respect to a reference frame; in this case, they are choosing the earth. In fact, even before Christ, there was a line in the Aeneid, the famous epic by Virgil (70–19 BC), where a moving boat was used as a reference point. Virgil wrote, “We set out from harbour, and lands and cities recede” (Aeneid 3:72). Similarly, when a train arrives at a station, we say that it stops to allow the passengers to get on and off; but once again, this treats the earth as a reference frame. The earth is flying through space at thousands of km/h in order to orbit the sun once per year, and the train is carried along with it. Hence, from the reference frame of an observer outside the solar system, it is always moving. However, most people would agree that to say that the train stopped is perfectly reasonable. Similarly, creation scientists argue that it is reasonable for the Bible to say that the sun stopped as, from the reference frame of the earth, this is how it appeared.

And if the above article isn’t sufficiently illuminating for you, you may benefit from reading the paper at:

God bless,
jon

Dear Ron,

I had already explained that it is a commonly observed fact that fresh water being less dense floats on top of salt water, I have observed this straightforward phenomena many times myself firsthand.

It is not an ad hoc explanation, it is based on personal observation.

Of course whether that was the case during the Global flood is unknowable, but what we do know is that the Bible affirms that the flood covered ALL the Earth and ALL flesh with the breathe of life in their nostrils was extinguished. Thus at least enough breeding pair examples of invertebrates obviously survived to repopulate the post flood Earth.

God bless,
jon

You would do yourself an immense service to read the article at:

And after you have read that article, this one:

and after that you would clearly benefit from reading about ‘Ancient Cosmology and the timescale of Genesis 1’ at:

God bless,
jon

And you would do yourself an immense service to explain why we are allowed to view the windows of heaven in Genesis 1-11 as figurative, and the raqia (dome) as figurative, while we are required to view the days as literal.

It’s not that young earthists are being too literal. It’s that they are inconsistent about it.

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Dear Roy,

Why do you write such nonsense?
I am not insulting anyone; you insult me by making false accusations.

It is well known that the Church in the 19th century prior to Darwin, Huxley and Lyell’s influence believed the historical Biblical account in Genesis as real history. That is they believed the days of creation as literal normal days as we experience today, and they believed that God spoke the creation into existence just as the Bible clearly teaches us, and they believed that the flood of Noah covered the ALL the Earth.

God bless,
jon

Have you done so during a storm when mountain ranges were galloping past at 30mph below you? If not, then your experience is not applicable.

Only if you ignore both Hebrew grammar and the normal use of language as illustrated elsewhere in Genesis where “all” only refers to things in the immediate context or is hyperbole.

I av no intention of reading anything from a site that not only lies but does so almost without interruption. I have read enough articles there to conclude that I will never find one that does not engage in lies.

Now if you have an actual scholarly site where people with actual expertise in ANE cosmology and mythology, I would go read, but I will not soil myself by reading at a site that plainly despises the scriptural admonitions to honesty and accuracy.

Amen to that!

Also why we should take the Creation accounts as literal when the ANE had no such category as historical prose.

It comes from the attitude that their uninformed understanding must be correct.

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Flat Earth proponents and @Burrawang are common in the rejection of science. Flat Earth followers just extent to the spacial what YEC do to the temporal.

Danny Faulkner of AiG wrote an article directed at flat earth interpretations. @Jay Johnson posted a classic for all time response here at BioLogos, where he copied and pasted portions of Dr. Faulkner’s article into a Word doc and used “find/replace” with these terms: flat/young, shape/age, "a sphere”/old, “a globe”/old, and “astronomy/geology”. Without further alteration, it became of pointed critique of Young Earth Creationism, and the mentality of display in this thread. Here it is…

How Do We Know What We Know?

Young-earthers raise an excellent epistemological question: how do we know what age is the earth? For three decades, I asked this very question of students in the first semester of my introductory geology class. The context of this question was the early history of geology. I would ask my students what age they thought the earth had. All my students would answer that the earth was old… When I asked my students how they knew the earth was old, not one student could give me a good reason…

… if one becomes convinced that the earth is young rather than being old, that is a major change in one’s worldview. If the earth truly is young, then we have been lied to about the earth’s age our entire lives. One must ask how and why this lie was created and perpetuated. Ultimately, this line of thinking leads to the conclusion that there must be a vast conspiracy about the earth’s age that has been going on for a long time. … It seems that the conspiracy to hide the earth’s true age is the motherlode of conspiracies. All other conspiracies easily are subsumed by this one.

… Why is the cosmological conspiracy believed by young-earthers all-encompassing? The answer lies in the fact that the alleged conspiracy is cosmological. Cosmology is foundational to one’s worldview. If we have been lied to about such an important, fundamental issue, then all other conspiracies are relatively small matters in comparison. Once one comes to believe that there is a vast conspiracy about cosmology, it is a relatively easy step to believe in many other sub-conspiracies.

But young-earthers typically are undeterred by such advice. They dismiss it as the mere teaching of a man. They proudly proclaim that they want to stick solely with what the Bible says. They fail to understand the importance of sound teaching taught in the very Bible they profess to uphold. God has ordained the church for several purposes, including instruction in the Scriptures. 1 Timothy 3:2 says that an overseer must be able to teach. But young-earthers frequently dismiss instruction from Godly men, insisting that they know more about what the Bible says than men who have devoted many decades to prayerful study of the Scriptures. It never occurs to young-earthers that they may be wrong in their understanding of the Bible. Nor does it occur to them that they have set themselves up as authorities on the meaning of the Bible, but their approach completely undermines the possibility of such an authority in the first place. … Some young-earthers also fashion themselves to be experts on science and the methodology of science. Consequently, they think of themselves as competent to dictate to scientists, both godly and ungodly, on how science ought to be conducted. But their definitions and practice of science appear to be formulated to make science as generally understood impossible.

Where do these young-earthers get the notion that they are capable of rewriting so many disciplines of study? This is particularly galling when one considers the limited science education that most young-earthers seem to have achieved. Their ready stock answer is that they haven’t been indoctrinated by all those years of study. These young-earthers fail to realize that without all that study, they don’t even understand what they criticize.

It is intellectually lazy for Christians in their fear to insist on a strictly literal approach to all of Scripture. Sadly, young-earthers who demand this hyper-literal approach to the Bible readily abandon it when it suits them. Ultimately, young-earthers place themselves in a position of authority while simultaneously deconstructing the idea that there can’t be any authority other than Scripture. They are blind to the fact that they have equated their understanding of Scripture with what the Bible says.

Another irony is that while young-earthers regularly dismiss any teaching on Scripture that they disagree with as mere teachings of men, they readily embrace the teachings of men with whom they agree.

This raises the question of whether the Christian version of the young-earth movement is a cult. The young-earth movement has some elements of a cult. Young-earthers insist that their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil. This is the major defining characteristic of a cult. On the other hand, a cult often denies one or more cardinal doctrines of Christianity, such as the deity of Jesus Christ. While some individual young-earthers who identify as Christian may stray a bit from orthodoxy, there is no consistent pattern of denying central tenets of Christianity among young-earthers. Furthermore, a cult usually is led by a central figure. As of yet, there is not a single person who seems to be leading the Christian version of the young-earth movement.

I have found that young-earthers readily believe almost anything that a fellow young-earther says. A young-earther comes up with a very lame argument that he posts on the internet; soon, another young-earthers endlessly repeat the poor argument, an argument that is easily refuted and often contains demonstrably false information. Yet it is nearly impossible to convince young-earthers of the folly of the claim. At the same time, young-earthers are highly resistant to any arguments for the conventional cosmology. Consequently, young-earthers have no skepticism for the claims of fellow young-earthers but have nothing but skepticism (or is contempt a better word?) for those critical of young-earth views… When young-earthers finally post the memes outside of the young-earth echo chambers, they often are surprised by the sharp, and well deserved, criticism that they encounter. Yet, the firm believers of a young earth are never deterred by this, because, as I pointed out before, young-earthers have zero skepticism of young-earth claims and impossibly high skepticism for any opposing positions.

In order to escape the delusion of a young earth, believers in such ideology must first realize that they have been duped by some very poor arguments.

So, I continue to battle this threat to biblical Christianity. I’m not interested in debating young-earthers. I don’t even try to convince them. Instead, my target audience is those who are true seekers, not those who think that they’ve already found truth in the falsity of young earth, without doing the proper research. I also provide answers to those who have seen the unfortunate effects of the young-earth movement in people that they know and love.

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