Given that starting point the old joke applies, “You can’t get there from here.”
Since you are the judge I don’t know how anybody could provide “the best biblical arguments.” It appears you have sampled them all and didn’t like any of them.
First, I don’t see how anyone could credibly claim to have “sampled them all.” I have looked hard, but I can’t, and won’t, claim that I’ve seen everything.
Second, evolution and the age of the earth are not insignificant issues. Belief in these concepts animates the worldviews of many, many people in our culture - especially of those who are influential in our culture. You may be right that I “can’t get there from here,” but the issues are important enough for me to give extra effort.
Third, and this is a very strong emotional driver for me, how could so many intelligent, educated, and believing-in-Christ-and-the-Bible people see something in the Bible that I don’t? I must be overlooking something - WHAT, PRAY TELL, IS IT?!?!?!
Oh for goodness sake… I don’t know how you think this will accomplish anything.
The wisdom of first determining the age of the Earth is based on the Science, not on the Bible.
Your approach strikes me as similar to a skeptic who says he doubts the existence of UFO’s piloted by aliens. He is magnanimous and objective, so he plans his due diligence:
-
Since I am no expert on physics and space ships, I will base my investigation on what the Aliens tell me.
-
I met with an Alien. He says he is real.
Are you getting my drift, Mike?
Your supposed objective approach is to first, ignore science. Nice. Consider yourself convinced. The Earth is Young!
1 Like
Agreed.
If I were to ask, “Is there anyone who believes in evolution or a billion-year-old earth (EorBYOE) for purely biblical reasons?” I would expect everyone to say, “No.” Therefore, I think everyone - at least everyone here - believes that the Bible merely allows or disallows EorBYOE. Science is putting forward the proposition(s) - the Bible is not.
Not at all. As I have shown above, the whole reason I’m willing to investigate the question of EorBYOE is because science is putting forth the claims, and putting them forth in relatively strong terms. If I were ignoring science, I’d have no struggle.
You don’t get to just cherry pick what you accept and what you deny with science. It is all interconnected. You don’t get to just reject evolution but actually must reject portions of if not all in the scientific fields of astrophysics, cosmology, nuclear physics, electromagnetism, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, reaction kinetics, materials science, botany, evolution, genetics, geology, plate tectonics, stratigraphy, paleontology, archaeology, etc. You need the fundamental forces to arbitrarily change at different points in history without serious consequences, you need God to trick us and create everything in the universe with apparent age (i.e. here’s the gift of science that will lead to so many technological advances allowed Mike Gantt to communicate with people from around the world from his devices based upon the laws of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism - BUT DON’T LOOK TOO FAR, I’m just tricking you with most of it).
This thread is ridiculous and the original post should be changed to just say ‘PROVE EVOLUTION TO ME USING ONLY THE SCRIPTURES.’ Don’t use science because I don’t care about it despite the fact that when I imagine the Earth, I do so using the results of science and not the flat, 3 tiered Cosmos the Scriptures actually teach. Don’t try to tell me about how you’ve measured the heavens in Cosmology because in Jeremiah 31:37 it actually says:
This is what the Lord says:Only if the heavens above can be measured
and the foundations of the earth below explored,
will I reject all of Israel’s descendants
because of all they have done—
this is the Lord’s declaration.
In other words, God will reject Israel’s descendants when the heavens can be measured. Twist it how you want but a ‘plain reading’ of that verse would indicate that since astronomy literally measured the heavens, Israel’s descendants will be rejected. Or maybe, just maybe, in lieu of many throughout history including the reformer John Calvin, God simply accommodated to the science of the day (i.e. spoke to them in a language they could understand about their world - in other words, according to their ancient understanding of the cosmos despite it being entirely incorrect in reality)
2 Likes
“My reading of the Bible leads me to believe that the earth is thousands, not billions, of years old.” + “I am unaware of any biblical verse or book that directly addresses the age of the earth or the universe.” = consistency?
“If I were ignoring science, I’d have no struggle.”
Maybe take that to prayer & let God work on your heart about it. You’re not ignoring the science & don’t want to like many others you know do.
It’s not that you have to become a scientist as an adult. What a large waste of time that would be & distract from your vocation! There are books in public understanding of science. That should be enough to convert from being a YEC, while remaining & even perhaps rejuvenating religious life … just not particularly with YECs who sadly still persist around you.
USA Christianity is such an outlier on the global stage, folks, it is astonishing. Just like Turkey, a whole unfortunate sector of the population has been “left behind” with their anti-evolution [content removed by moderator] peaching to believers. Some here are saying YECs in USA have been “misled”, but it isn’t my place to say whether or how that may be true, as I’m not evangelical American.
1 Like
They aren’t getting old earth or evolution from the Bible. If you don’t want to look at the science at all, then why should the lack of harmony between science and the Bible bother you? Keep ignoring it, and be young earth, that is definitely the path of least resistance and what seems to be most acceptable to you.
3 Likes
This response won’t be an endorsement of any complete meal (maybe a morsel or two, though) so much as a reason why I’ve at least decided to abandon one biblical cafeteria line in favor of coming through this line that you currently inquire about and some of us have been grazing at already for a time.
I’ve read many English versions of the bible many times --not as a credentialed scholar, but as a Christian devotee who maintains and cultivates intellectual rigor as part of my own wholistic spiritual growth. In that pursuit, I’ve come to recognize a certain internal incoherence or poverty if you will, of what I describe as a fundamentalistic approach to Scripture; one which seeks to assert simplistically that it can and should just be read for its surface statements – no interpretation necessary, and that as such everything one draws from it (simply reading it as a child would) must be factually correct. Yes – I know many mature fundamentalists would add some nuance to some of that, and of course accept that there are different genres, but only where they are explicitly labeled as such. “Nuance” after all must be a liberal thing, so they don’t stay on that road any more than demanded. But definitional tweaks of the above aside, I find that whole approach has wrested the central message of the arc of all Scriptures away from Scripture and toward something else non-Scriptural. Reading Scriptures that way (as I have done before) forces my concentration away from the message at hand into contortions in the service of something else that ironically has its roots more in modern fundamentalisms than in Scriptures themselves. So I have abandoned those buffet lines in favor trying to get back into the Scriptures themselves.
Now – just because I find fault with one swath of approaches doesn’t mean that the buffet line here is without fault; not by a long shot. You’ve been here enough to see we have all manner of dishes being served up here too: some junk food, some nutritious. Let me share a few morsels with you that have been enlightening, and shaping for me: John 5:39: “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” This has functioned as a reminder to me that it is Jesus that is the true Word of God and in him is our true salvation. The Bible is sacred precisely because it points us to him. Some might object to me that he could only have been referring to the then-existing “Law and the Prophets” when he said that – true enough. But they then conveniently forget this same fact when sighting passages like I Timothy 3:16 that refers to all Scripture as being God-breathed and useful … which they suddenly and inconsistently will apply to all future writings that have yet to be recognized as Scripture. But I don’t have any dog in that fight anymore since most of my fundamentalisms have been unable to survive exposure to Scriptures themselves. They fail not because of science or any modern -ism that has come along or perhaps corrupted us. They fail in the Bible itself. I maintain that the most dangerous book that fundamentalists (or perhaps YECs or others invested in certain narrow strictures on Scripture) can read is the Bible itself. If they want to preserve their cause, they had best ban the Bible --all except certain pre-approved and pre-interpreted passages of it anyway. No other book, if studied carefully will shake the faith of their vulnerable youth more.
So the main course of this new buffet, instead of serving up a course of Genesis 1 and then saving Jesus for dessert, we here believe Jesus is the main course, and that Genesis and all other things we may learn from Scriptures all serve as the tasty side-dishes. Important, yes. But Jesus alone (and not the Bible – not some particular understanding of Genesis) is our one true foundation. How do I know this? From reading the Bible! It is a pointer to our salvation (Jesus) and not salvation itself as the John passage above makes clear to me.
Yes, our buffet here includes all manner of quackery. We don’t escape having to do the hard work of discernment in any buffet line. But here I do appreciate the overall emphasis --more than that: the very centrality of Christ himself. It is in his light that we discern and understand the very valuable knowledge and wisdom Scripture has to offer us.
1 Like
Your characterization of the thread is smack on.
I don’t see the point of this discussion at all.
If someone uses the Bible to ratify portions of Science, or even to allow portions of Science, this is the very basis of the YEC stance.
@Mike_Gantt, you might not consider yourself a YEC, but your position is the YEC position - - whether you think you fit into the nominal YEC mindset or not.
2 Likes
Oh I see. You aren’t ignoring science. You just rank the findings of science as a second tier of information, rather than the first tier.
I consider Science to be an Eye witness of the natural world and my existence in this Universe.
Those areas where science doesn’t find much agreement or lacking in adequate consensus are the areas where I look to an authority like the Bible to step in.
You are reversing this process.
1 Like
Then why are you reading and responding to it?
I plan to stop posting sometime tomorrow, but if that’s not soon enough for you, see if you can unsubscribe to this topic.
Since there are OEC’s who don’t accept evolution, I assume you’d direct this criticism to them as well. Oh well, at least I’d be in some good scientific company.
Consistency is realized when you understand that the first statement I made applies to what the Bible says about the subject implicitly while the second applies to what the Bible says about the subject explicitly.
As I’ve said multiple times in multiple ways, I agree with this point.
As I’ve said multiple times in multiple ways, it’s not the science of evolution or the age of the earth that bothers me. Rather, it’s the implied historical and truth claims they make that appear to me to conflict with implied and explicit historical and truth claims the Bible makes.
It’s history, not science, where the conflict that bothers me resides. If science was content to be science and would let history be history, I could live with the conflict. But in this case science is insisting on being history, bringing it into conflict with the history given us by the Bible. That’s a conflict I cannot ignore.
Amen and amen!
This is exactly the sort of thinking I hoped to find when I came here. This attitude doesn’t by itself solve the issue, but it does make the issue easier to solve. Moreover, it transcends the issue whether the issue gets solved or not.
Does that not create an even greater conflict? If science is a way of looking at evidence and telling us how we got to here, and how to make sense of what we observe, you may call it history, but if you cannot trust what is observed, how can you trust your senses and make sense of anything you see and hear, including the Bible?
In a modern paraphrase of Jesus at the end of John’s Gospel ‘whether I criticize them or not, what is that to you? As for you, what do you think of my questions and statements?’
Definitely not. There is a reason the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case went the way it did and nobody teaches ID or Hugh Ross’ material in public schools and universities. There’s a reason why OEC who deny evolution don’t publish in scientific journals and have to make their own while ignoring lots and lots of evidence.
1 Like
This doesn’t make sense to me and I suspect I am not alone. The science describes natural history. There is no other access to the historical realities of the beginnings of the universe and the development of life on earth except through science. There are no eye witnesses or primary source historical documents to interview or examine. (Unless you count the Bible as such a source, which I think is a mistake.) I don’t see how you separate science and history in the case of evolution and claim you are interested in one not the other. The difference between “historical science” and “operational science” is one that only matters to Creationists for their antagonistic rhetorical purposes.
I’m not so much interested in where people slot me; I just want to know the truth so I can practice it (John 3:19-21).
George, since I only seem to upset you, why don’t you quit reading my posts?
I plan to stop writing sometime tomorrow anyway, but between now and then surely the software that serves this forum gives you some means to exit this topic or block me.
I don’t know if this will help, but here goes.
While you say you are reading the Bible you need to realize that what you are actually doing is interpreting the Bible. Interpretation is man made and therefore subject to error. As part of interpretation you bring a set of initial assumptions to the reading that will inform how you will understand what you have read. So have you thought about what exactly your assumptions are? The reason other people see something that you don’t is a result of using a different set of assumptions. Until you change your assumptions the message you get from the Bible will remain the same. There is also the inspiration you can receive from the Holy Spirit as you read and that shouldn’t be ignored, but that is personal and other people’s inspiration will not the same as yours.
Going open kimono, here these are some of my assumptions.
The Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God.
The Bible was written for our salvation.
The Bible was not written as an accurate description of how the world was created. The Bible is concerned with the why not the how.
The Bible indicates that God is in control of the natural processes that were known at the time it was written.
The Bible, by extension, indicates that God is in control of any natural process. Which to me would include evolution.
How God controls these natural processes is not indicated.
And for inspiration, while reading Genesis 1:1 I received a clear impression from the Holy Spirit that that verse was the most important one in Genesis 1-11.
2 Likes