What would a young earth look like?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Adam, I assume no such thing. I am fully aware that individuals of influence in the world attempt to corrupt truth. Anyone who assumes that individuals of influence in the world do not attempt to corrupt truth is very, very naive.

But there is a limit to how much truth you can corrupt with limited resources. For the earth to be six thousand years old, yet for scientists to be reporting the level of intricate detail, precise measurements and self-consistency in support of an ancient earth and evolution that they do, you would need far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far more than just “individuals of influence in the world covering up the truth.” You would need millions of scientists worldwide to have been colluding with each other to fabricate and fudge evidence in extraordinary detail on an industrial scale for more than two hundred years. The financial cost of such a deception would run into the trillions of dollars.

Such a deception would have to include scientists and ex-scientists who not only had no incentive whatsoever to keep quiet about it, but every incentive to blow the whistle. Some geologists and evolutionary biologists no longer work in the field but have moved on to other industries. Some of them have failed to secure postdoctoral positions in the respective fields and are no doubt bitter about it as a result. Some of them live and work in the Middle East, where the prevailing Islamic culture would have them shouting about such a deception from the rooftops if it were actually happening. And some of them are retirees. And then what about other scientists working in other areas of research, competing against it for funding? Do you really believe that they would remain silent if they saw such an extraordinary amount of money going to waste when it could be funding their own more profitable and useful research instead? What about university administrators demanding an account from the “evolutionists” of what they are spending their grant money on? What about politicians allocating funding for it from taxpayers’ money?

Yet despite all of this, where is the evidence of such an extraordinary level of collusion? We never hear a peep about it from anyone. Even YECs, who claim that such a thing is going on, only cite in support of it a handful of isolated cases of fraud (or even just honest mistakes being portrayed as fraud) from nearly a century ago, such as Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man or Haeckel’s diagrams – nowhere near sufficient to establish the kind of levels of collusion we are talking about. Nor do any of the YECs in the US Congress, who are in a position to influence government spending on these areas of research, ever question where the money is going. You will even search in vain to try and find anything about it on Wikileaks.

No, Adam. If evolution and an ancient earth were the product of individuals of influence corrupting truth, that would be the mother of all conspiracies. NASA faking the moon landings, chemtrails, aliens in Area 51, 9/11 being an inside job, and the US Navy covering up the existence of mermaids, would be child’s play by comparison. Yes, individuals of influence corrupt truth. But not on the industrial scale spanning multiple centuries and costing trillions of dollars that you would require to establish your case. Conspiracies of that magnitude do not happen, it’s as simple as that, and certainly not without a lot of people blowing the gaff on it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Adam. This has nothing to do with secularism. It has nothing to do with denying God. It’s simply a matter of getting your facts straight, being honest about how you interpret the evidence, and being realistic about the kind of deception and covering things up that human beings are actually capable of in reality. Nothing more, nothing less.

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Put yourself in the position of an ancient Hebrew reading Genesis. What of accelerated radioactive decay, accelerated light from distant galaxies, accelerated plate tectonics, and accelerated limestone formation, would be gleaned from the text? All of that is extra Biblical. Did Israelites think dinosaurs were on the ark? Not found in the Bible.

Baraminology is exegetically unsound. Nothing indicates that Moses or whoever penned the Pentateuch, or any of his immediate readers would have thought that lions ever begat anything other than lions, and leopards anything other than leopards. Dogs, foxes, wolves, and jackals; horses and donkeys, all had Hebrew names in the Bible and there is no reason to think that the intention is anything other than the particular names Adam gave. After all, Hebrew names generally had meanings and these Biblical names which were to be taken as actual go all the way back to Adam and Eve. Speciation as envisioned by AiG or CMI is not a teaching of scripture.

The YEC/ID spokespeople you have named are not expounding scripture, they are reacting against science. 99 percent of what they say would not be said were it not for mainstream scientific discovery.

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The first question to ask whenever anyone proposes a conspiracy theory is “What do those covering up the evidence have to gain by doing so?” And not some amorphous abstract gain, but real world, tangible gains. Often times, the answer is… not a lot.

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A few specific examples I’ve seen are “Scientists are inventing climate change in order to get more grant money”. The only people that is plausible to are the ones that have no idea how hard it is to get grant money for anything.

Less plausible still are claims of “Paleontologists have lots of funding if they support evolution.” To which the obvious response is “What about all the amateur fossil collectors, who aren’t getting any money for their work?”

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The Mature age theory is self-defeating…

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Agreed. For example, what do the grant suppliers stand to gain by suppressing research into alternatives to evolution?

Your reference to the amateur is a great example too. It’s the secret army fallacy. You know, the Bond villain has a private army that no one knows about even though everyone of the private soldiers, doctors, mechanics, and support staff are all supposed to be real people with spouses, kids, and grandparents, who cut a cheque at the end of the month and pay their taxes. The trope only works because we willingly suspend disbelief for the sake of the narrative.

For the falsity of evolution to be a cover up it would mean millions of companies, labs, governments (some from nations hostile to each other), scientists, chemists, lab technicians, administrators, and amateurs at home, all being in on it. And for what gain?

I mean, surely they can’t all have been duped can they?

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Ken Ham seems to know exactly how many of them were on the ark. If exhibit from his ark museum is to be believed.
One thing that really puzzles me about YEC beliefs is that if they think dinos were on the ark only 5000 y ago, then where they’ve gone? Other animals seem to have stayed with us

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I don’t see how those two concepts are related. God could create a fake history and have the Bible say what it says.

Science says no such thing.

You still haven’t shown how the interpretations of observations are wrong. All you can do is accuse them of being humanistic which would come as a surprise the millions of Christian scientists out there.

This seems to be a tacit admission that one has to ignore the evidence in order to cling to creationism.

What about adjusting biblical theology so that it accurately reflects the facts we can observe around us?

Then how can we see stars billions of light years away if the universe is only 6,000 years old?

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And of course, the way science works, if someone were to come up with a coherent theory that could replace evolution, they would be Nobel prize winners and forever famous. As an example, Dr. Mary Schweitzer by finding soft tissue microfossils and remnants is a household name in the field, when if she had not, she would be swept into obscurity like the rest of us.

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Like all the people who have found even older preserved bivalve ligaments, which for some reason gets less publicity.

Incidentally, this (and older pieces of amber) disprove the claim that finding soft tissue that old was inherently novel. What is novel is large vertebrate soft tissue preserved in a recognizable way.

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I recall reading that the etymology of ‘lion’ in Hebrew had to do with tearing. All those herbivore lions. Sure.

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The ultimate source of authority is reality.
 

You are free to distinguish between the secular scientific understanding of gravity and the Christian one… oh wait.

Yes, as I suspected… I thought you had seen this before, but you didn’t learn anything from it, I guess:

 

That’s still funnier than usual. :laughing:

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I do not follow the logic of this statement?
“In the beginning God” … when I read that statement, I see a being that is outside of time and space. He is not limited by science as we know it. I don’t actually think he is in fact limited by anything other than his own perfection and power.

I guess an example of this is the bible text that says “his love knows no bounds”.

We know that God demonstrates his love through his creative acts…such as the creation of this earth and all life upon it.

Therefore, if Gods love knows no bounds, and creating is a demonstration of that love, then God has no bounds!

I do not think the statement “making a rock so big he cannot lift it” can be interpreted in a manner which can then be translated into rationalising theistic evolutionary theology simply because humanism and its ungodly use of science says the bible must be wrong if read literally (as any English teacher with even a little training will admit from reading the text, Moses clearly intended)

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Have you considered how creation relates to God’s love of himself?

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a good point…my take on that is that Bible theology argues that a demonstration of love by God is through His very personal acts of creation (bending down and breathing the breath of life into Adams nostrils Genesis 2:7)

7 Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.d

As an imperfect illustration an artist expresses themselves through the creation of their works of art.

We as imperfect beings would argue that often artists may express hatred or evil, however, since God is neither one of hate or evil…with the caveat that I believe (and I believe its also biblical theology) our Maker and evil cannot coexist in the same space indefinitely.

I know my artists expression of themselves as an illustration of the love of God is a very poor comparison… its the best I can think of right now.

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“The genetic evidence is that mutations–almost all harmful–are accumulating at the rate of 80 to 100 per human generation.”

This is a popular error. In fact, most mutations have no noticeable effect, unless you count the production of new raw material for evolution. Of the mutations that do have an effect, small mutations have a roughly equal chance of increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of their working. Whether increasing or decreasing effectiveness matters, and if so, whether it helps or harms the organism, varies not only gene to gene and species to species but also on the particular situation - assessing whether a mutation is harmful or not is not simple. Some anti-evolutionary claims dishonestly take advantage of that by claiming that, because a mutation could be disadvantageous under a certain scenario, it’s therefore harmful.

Large mutations tend to have a big effect. If they affect a gene that is already functional, they are likely to change its function noticeably. However, again that hits the problem of whether such change is good or bad. For an organism that is currently doing well, a big change is likely to be bad, and evolution will favor a lack of change. Conversely, if an organism is not doing well, maybe a mutation will be an advantage. Note also that large, harmful mutations often prevent an organism from surviving and reproducing, so those mutations do not accumulate in a population.

Also, if the claimed buildup of mutations were true, we should see humanity noticeably declining over time as mutations accumulate. But we don’t. Likewise, applying the same reasoning to other species would imply that anything that has much shorter generation times than humans should already be extinct. Yet there are lots of bugs and weeds and other short-lived organisms.

The idea that complexity is evidence for Intelligent Design is also untrue. Just look at a tax form. More complex is not more intelligent. The complexity of the genome and epigenome is like that of a Rube Goldberg cartoon - take what is handy and make it do what you want, as expected for design by evolution, not like the complexity of something built like a human engineer would.

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