Well if God isn’t creating a fake history, then the earth must be billions of years old. Period. End of story.
The Bible tells us in Romans 1:20 that the character and nature of God are obvious from what is created, even to unbelievers. In other words, according to the Bible itself, if the earth really were six thousand years old, that fact would be obvious even to unbelievers without having to refer to Genesis. YECs wouldn’t have to come up with rescuing devices involving billion-fold changes to the speed of light and nuclear decay rates, or tree rings, ice cores and lake varves being deposited at a rate of several thousand a day, or continents racing around the planet as if it were the Nurburgring. The fact that the earth was six thousand years old would be something that could be determined empirically, with high precision, simply by measuring things.
It is not “secular science” that tells us that the earth has the appearance of billions of years of age. It is measurement. The Resurrection does not change the fact that a young earth cannot be reconciled with the evidence that we see in nature. The fact that Jesus died for our sins does not change the fact that zircons contain lead, humans and chimps share 200,000 endogenous retroviruses in the same places in our genomes, and nuclear decay rates do not change a smidgen during global catastrophes. It’s nothing whatsoever to do with “non-Godly scientific world views.” It’s a matter of getting your facts straight and being honest about how you approach these things. Nothing more, nothing less.
What is your citation for this? What secular scientific community views a young earth as a better explanation? Or did you just think that sounded good?
We already discussed Snelling concerning radiometric dating. Based on a long record of indefensible misrepresentations, he has no credibility.
Where does Jesus miracle of turning water into wine fit with the issue of the appearance of age?
If we were to carry the analogy over to the earth as we find with fossil evidence, it would be like Jesus creating the wine with bits of cork in it. Which I find to be a ridiculous notion, but not entirely impossible.
Secular science does no such thing, by defininition. Science is secular by definition. “Secular” means “not specifically religious”, thus most clothing, Dvorak music, mathematics, jobs, etc. are secular.
I think the suggestion is, at the moment when God created the universe 6000 years ago, he precisely fabricated the electromagnetic field, everywhere, so as to create the false appearance of electromagnetic waves originating from distant sources 6000 to 14 billion light years away.
Sorry but my God doesn’t lie. And if He can lie about this what else is false? Perhaps the verse about seeing His nature in creation is false and that would make this falsehood ok. Do two wrongs make a right?
There’s a lot of discussion on this thread about the earth having an appearance of age, and how some YECs try to accommodate it. This is useful and informative, but it’s not actually the subject that I raised originally here. The question I am asking is specifically: what would the earth look like if it didn’t have the appearance of age, but if the scientific evidence did indeed actually point to a recent creation six thousand years ago?
There’s a related question we can ask. What would the earth look like if the evidence really were ambiguous? What would it look like if it really were impossible to tell the difference between a six thousand year old earth and a 4.5 billion year old earth? Would such a scenario even be physically possible?
Thanks for getting us back on track, JammyCakes. Genuine question, can fossilisation happen in 6k years? If not the ground would be conspicuously empty of them.
It would certainly be different. No fertile soil for instance. Takes time for rock to erode and produce the fine particles needed. No extinct volcanos. The list would go on and on.
Y’all missing the point. YEC claim that the was created all ready for our use. So there would have been soil and everything else needed by humans and animals…
Great point. Which is why I used fossils (and earlier, mega arthropods), as examples. Neither of those things are necessary for humans and animals to live. But in a young earth we’d expect to find none, or very few, of the former and plenty of the latter.
So when you examine soil you can determine the parent rock and physics gives you an estimate of the time required for erosion to create the particles. There are so many things that have a history “built in” that I don’t know what would be left if you threw them all out. Mountains would look uneroded. The Niagara Falls wouldn’t be in their current location. @jammycakes what are you looking for?
Define “fossilization”. The level that most non-leached fossil shells are at (ignoring amino acid racemization or protein degradation, which are another set of dating methods that independently line up very well with radiometric) is essentially “it’s been buried long enough to lose most of the pigments, none of the muscles are left, but the bivalve ligaments are sometimes still there”, so more than a few decades, but not necessarily tens of thousands of years.
Aragonite leaching, however, seems to take hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years (freshwater is somewhat faster than marine). Thorough mineralization normally takes way more than 6000 years.
Just some things that we can say to YECs, “Look, if the earth really were six thousand years old, this is what we would expect to see. Do we?” Or something like that. And the usual general discussion around it.
Interrelated with what a young earth would look like, is the view that the flood was literal and global. I suppose you could be a YEC and accept a regional flood, but I have not seen that position taken by any.
If you had a young earth and global flood about 1000 years into creation, you would see mountains with sediment washed away down to bedrock, and much of the lower lands would look like the scablands worldwide as the water flowed off as it resolved. Of course those who hold to a young earth would invoke fast moving tectonics and such, as well as rapid evolution of species within “kinds” and other just-so stories, but ultimately the number of divine intervientions to maintain the illusion become overwhelming.
In some a ways assuming God could be very detailed in his simulating an ancient universe last Thursday that would make quite a few other things simpler. No need for an actual virgin birth. Compared to getting the rings on the trees and the fossils in the ground, doctoring the historical record would be a snap. No need for a virgin birth, water to wine or a resurrection for that matter. No need for a historical Jesus at all. The Bible and historical record can be made to square with very little divine effort. I wonder if any of these deceptions would amount to a bridge too for the Ham handed or is the limitless power of God sufficient?
and this is exactly true with the exception of your making the assumption that individuals of influence in the world do not attempt to corrupt truth! Therein lieth the fundamental flaw in your entire belief system of Theistic Evolution…you claim that truth is not corrupted by Evolutionary proponents who deny the existence of a creator (which is by far the vast majority of them and I would argue is the entire basis of the theory…if there is no God, how then did we get here)
Waht is very evident is that the research from Dr Kurt Wise, Andrew Snelling, Stephen Myer, Michael Behe, Stephen Jeanson…and many others are now digging up is overwhelmingly in favor of a direct reading of the Biblical story of creation, the fall of man, and the flood.
I mean think about it, if you are designing a functioning system, do you design a system that is not yet functioning? Of course not, that is an absurd idea…no system in and of itself ever works this way. Why then would God “have to” design only the model of evolution and then have no further input into it becoming self aware? God himself specifically is recorded by Moses as “speaking everything into existence”.
God came down close to Adam and “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils”. I would love to see you produce a consensus of English literary experts who collectively agree that one should illustrate that statement by Moses any other way than exactly how I interpret it!
If God is outside of space and time thus creating from nothing, why do you place restrictions on His creative abilities by saying that a fully developed system is not within His abilities?
I do not accept that it is reasonable to put the secular (without God) argument out there that science observes God did not create a mature fully functioning universe. The above mentioned scientists (among a rapidly increasing number of like minded scientists) are now discovering that the secular view is grossly inadequate and in fact there is plenty of strong evidence supporting the Biblical Creation and Global Flood accounts exactly as written.
Except when it’s not … which thus far has been … all the time. Here’s the pattern that keeps repeating for everyone to watch: alleged evidence for YEC beliefs are brought out and examined, and cannot stand up to examination. It falls apart.
Meanwhile, evidence for an ancient earth is put forward, and you are asked to consider it under the most glaring lights you can subject it to … tell us what you think is wrong with it … and we get … crickets.
was created all ready for our use. So there would have been soil and everything else needed by humans and animals…