Claims are easy to make. Name one or two ways scientists ‘circumvent’ the belief that physics was the same in any dating? The things you mentioned do not do that of course -
“Over time, as Rubidium decays,” - This assumes decay and great time! Same principle, assuming a same state past.
“When zircon crystals form in magma..” Who cares how things now work and form in this nature? You seek to make that represent the past, where we do not know how things worked and formed, and what may have been already here by having been created etc
“When a rock is molten magma, any preexisting Argon gas freely bubbles out and escapes..” Again, that is what it does NOW IN this nature and state. Your WHOLE game is to try and make this equal the far past. Total religion.
Have you some reason to claim that and evening and morning were actually millions of years? Have you some reason to claim that plants being created days before the sun was in the heavens could have lived billions of years without the sun? Present your case rather than allusions
No. I claim billions of years because that’s how the world looks and through the consistencies of the investigations made.
For your claim, tell us the precise changes and timings in physical constants and chemical processes necessary to make a 6000 year old planet look like a 4 billion year old one. You should explain how the short term burst of radioactivity required to reach the current isotope concentration didn’t fry the Earth. Tell us how photon velocities changed to deliver light 10s of billions light years away to make distant galaxies visible. Numbers, not hand waving.
There is no physical evidence that plants existed fore the sun. Life on Earth didn’t exist before the sun ignited.
No. It only ‘looks’ that way through the coloured belief lenses you use in looking at it. It is not me that has the claim here but science. They claim that the present is the key to the past. They claim and believe it was the same. Also, if creation was the reason things are here radioactivity is very much after the fact! It was not the cause for creation, the world or the stars. Radiation is merely a feature of this world today (and man assumes also deep space, because we here see things here in our nature from out there that we assume must also obey all our time ans space rules etc)
Again. Demonstrate. You say physics changed. Well, how did they? When? What? Did the fine structure constant change? The permittivity of space? You can’t just assert an opinion to deny mature and well tested body of work. Show your math. Show how your model of physics and chemistry either explains the data better or at least offers comparable results.
Currently this discussion isn’t even up to level with Young Earth creation scientists who are trying to figure out the details (unsuccessfully so far, but at least trying to wrestle seriously with the issues).
I do not consider the communications of the Creator to be second hand at all. We must consider the people’s opinion today, long after the fact of creation (and based on only a part of the picture, namely the physical only, and present nature only) to be very much second hand
I believe that God created the universe. How that happened is another question.
Genesis is not something written to us. It is text from the Ancient Near East (ANE), told to people who lived in that context. There were no journalists, no modern-type history writing during those millennia.The important messages about God were told in a way that the receivers could receive and understand. If we try to interpret the text as it would be a textbook or report written to us, reflecting our modern worldview, we misunderstand the text.
If we read carefully what Genesis 1 tells, we can see that the creation story reflects ANE worldview, not our worldview.
In the ANE worldview, creation did not start from nothing, it started from a chaos sea.
God created a suitable place for humans by forming some kind of pocket inside the chaos sea. The sea surrounded the ‘pocket’ from all directions, above, below and around. God formed a firmament above the land to separate the sphere of humans from the waters that were above the firmament. Also the heavens were above the firmament. In the ancient world, both ANE and elsewhere, people believed that the firmament was a solid structure above a flat earth disk. The firmament was described as formed of metal or stone, depending on the culture.
We could find also other connections to ANE worldview but the points above should be enough to show that the story is told within the ancient worldview, not within our modern worldview.
We are reading something like a very old letter written to someone else. We can learn from the ‘letter’ but only if we remember that it was written in a different context, to people who understood the world in a very different way than we, using an ancient genre of writing that modern humans do not use.
If you decide to read the text like a modern report written to you, that is your right. The problem with that is that it will lead to interpretations that the original writer did not intend.
I can’t think of anything that could stop animals walking across mud or drowning in it and leaving footprints or bones behind that would fossilise if the mud dried and hardened.
Was there no mud until after Babel?[1] Were all previously buried animals, footprints and other items disinterred and scattered during the flood, so that all fossils, right down to the earliest stromatolites, date from the flood or later? Were all pre-Babel animals immortal and featherweight, and did their discarded eggshells, baby teeth, sloughed skin and poop miraculously vanish?
P.S. Nothing in your post gets round the problem that the world looks old. It doesn’t matter if there was some change circa Babel that led to physics being different, if the result is that actual history differs greatly from apparent history, then God is a deceiver.
Or, if Numbers 13 isn’t propaganda, after Moses. ↩︎
Of course Genesis is for us! Not like Adam needed to know so much, he was there for a lot of it. Scripture and genesis in particular is not a world view. It is a record of what happened and where it came from. God is alive. And well. He will be recreating the world and universe soon as well. He danced all over the laws of physics when He was here! They were hardly even ‘suggestions’ to God!
So God is not faithful? He can’t be counted on to run the universe in an orderly, consistent manner?
So? Scripture tells us why.
They never did. Divide the timeline by the number of appearances and it turns out they’re rare.
And where is that in the text?!
So your version of God isn’t faithful – He changes the rules on us.
Yes – it is the belief that God is faithful, not some whimsical ANE deity who changes the rules now and then.
No, all of science rests on the assumption that God is faithful – that’s how science even got started! The kind of thought you are setting forth requires God to be so faithless as to force writers to use literary types that wouldn’t be invented for millennia.
It is coming from a writing unless you spoke directly with the Creator about this. And that is filtered through your lense of interpretation and the scribes and colored by original intent of the author.
Funny how natural science was a discipline started by devout Christians expecting to discover how God created this world. By most accounts that’s still successful
How is it you imagine that changes (such as the Millennium in the future) mean that God is not faithful?? Quite the contrary. There are not a lot of things in the land that there used to be. This should tell us it is different now. Not sure what you think it tells you? You are going to tell us what angels do and used to do now??! You know that how? Do you even believe in spirits?
We are told animals and man were here and created the same week. Adam named the animals, in case anyone doubts it. That is the text. So if they did not or could not leave remains in the near flood era days, then why should we assume they should have? What text says we should?
Of course things changed after the fall of man. in the flood year in many ways as well. And in general also we know that things are different today than in the time of Noah and Adam. The record is clear. You claim science starts out assuming God is faithful! That is not true. There is no God in their knowledge whatsoever. It is devoid of God. Devoid of anything spiritual. It is also completely opposed to His word.
Well, that’s not an unverified assumption. Constancy is evaluated and cross checked. For example, we know atmospheric C14 has varied thanks in part to understanding of how it is formed and dendrochronology.
Biblical scholars studying Genesis in the original, long before science began as an activity, concluded that the Earth is billions of years old – or millions. Thus your question is wrong as it assumes that you can read Genesis 1 better than scholars who grew up reading it.
Importantly, you’re demanding that the Holy Spirit had to force ancient writers to write in a literary form that wouldn’t exist for centuries (at least) rather than using the literary forms they knew. That’s near-blasphemous as well as dishonest. Instead, let the Bible be what it is – and that isn’t a set of reports written in the style of an objective observer.
As Knor puts it:
That’s called letting the Bible be what it is. It leads to the historical-grammatical method, which when looking at the text starts with the question “What sort of writing is this?” – for the simple reason that if you don’t know what wort of writing it is, you can’t know what it means (e.g. you won’t know whether a list of foods is a recipe, a shopping list, or someone daydreaming).
And we dishonor them – and the Holy Spirit! – by ignoring their culture.
For us, yes; to us, no.
BTW, you just expressed a worldview when you said “it is a record of what happened”.
It’s impossible to approach any writing without a worldview – you’re approaching Genesis through a MSWV (modern scientific worldview) where something is only true if it is scientifically and historically accurate. The Bible does not share that worldview.
Where do you get that?
Try reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – it has a concept that applies well here, the idea of “deep magic”: Jesus may have just been applying physics in ways we don’t understand.
Besides that, the fact that Jesus did miracles is hardly sufficient to establish the proposition that Yahweh changed the rules on us.