Why do people oppose YEC?

Really? So pastors and teachers that taught Genesis as it is written, without science’s superior knowledge which must include evolution, have been wrong all these years? Only those with “enough” knowledge of modern (recent) science have the correct understanding to teach and pastor the church? Only those who "accept the science are getting it correct? Apparently pastors and teachers for untold generations would have been better off to drown with a millstone. (Matthew 18:6). That’s a very sad and disturbing thought.
It’s no wonder the testimonies you refer to are “managing to hold onto” their faith. Very unfortunate for those who don’t “manage”, which I suspect is a great number.
It makes me very sad to hear of a need to have a deep understanding of science in order to get the Bible correct. Science is man’s knowledge. Far different from God’s wisdom. Please let the faith of sincere Christians (who are less “educated” than you) stand as valid instead of saying science must be understood. Very few people can understand the full narratives and details that science is putting forth. And if they dig into details they see more and more questions - disagreements and unanswerable questions. Telling people to just “accept the science” seems extremely dangerous. Our gravity based, Big Bang cosmology, and these evolutions theories are full of extremely huge problems. Why would anyone want to elevate them to confuse another Christian? The Big Bang is a wild idea - totally unproven… Evolution still hasn’t answered how life began - which seems pretty important before considering any of the rest. The $10 million dollar prize for answering “Where did information come from” is still not won. Not even close to being given away. That seems like a key issue too. Meanwhile, simple faith in what the Bible says, promises anyone love, peace and joy. I know that peace. I’ve seen lives dramatically changed by God’s power, and their generations of offspring that follow also having faith. Yes I am old.
I find it very hard to see that love, peace and joy coming from your directive that Christians need to “know what you (we) are talking about before you (we) try to challenge complex technical subjects”. In effect, you are saying “accept the science”. That seems to me to be extremely dangerous -trusting in man’s knowledge over faith. I think a simple faith in the Bible - as is, without the “advantage” of our current science academia is the best way to teach the Bible to the world. Science may provide a lot of good things, The sciences of cosmology and evolution …not so much.

Please do not confuse science with theology, which YEC has done. They are not enemies. God is the Source of both.

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Faith and understanding such as what God allows us to receive doesn’t require anybody (then or now) to pass some “test” of knowledge or understanding only available to smart (or now scientifically-informed) people. No - what would be expected, both of any ancients as well as of us today and all who fill that gap, is that we would be honest with whatever knowledge we have been privileged to have been given. They would not have insisted then that their received testimonies of law or prophet include revelations that could be seen to be false. And nor should any honest believers today. In this way modern YECs are breaking with all forebears of faith in the past by trying to inject falsehood into our understandings of scriptures. And yes - there will be judgment for those who knowingly do or did so - both then and now.

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No, that is a complete misunderstanding. No knowledge of science is required at all. None. What is needed, however, is an understanding of how and why the early chapters of Genesis developed and were edited together, and what message it was conveying to its people in its time.

Genesis was not written by us. Nor primarily to us. It took shape and was written for its people in its time.

Of course. That’s because evolution is about the development of life from life. Evolution is not about “how life began”. And if someone told you that evolution is about “how life began”, then they were not telling you the truth. I won’t say they were lying. But they were definitely not telling you the truth. They were misled, and you would be wise not to be misled by them. Evolution is not, nor ever was, about “how life began”.

Our faith is in Christ. We take care not to idolise scripture over and above Christ. We don’t proclaim the Bible to the world. We proclaim Christ.

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No. Only those who have enough knowledge of how science works have the correct understanding to challenge scientific theories. You can pastor a church and teach the Bible as written perfectly well without challenging scientific theories. My father was a pastor and Bible teacher. He didn’t have a background in science (his PhD was in theology). But he managed to teach the Bible as written without getting sidetracked into challenging scientific theories that he didn’t understand. He was smart enough (and honest enough) to admit that he didn’t know what he didn’t know. There are lots of other pastors that I know about whom I could say exactly the same thing. Sadly, there are also lots of pastors that I know about whom I could not.

And I’m sorry but you do need to know what you’re talking about before you try to challenge a scientific theory – evolution included. Science has rules, and people who think that they can challenge scientific theories without first understanding the rules routinely come out with claims that are quite frankly scientifically illiterate. Claims that can be falsified with nothing more than a Google search. Claims that demonstrate an ignorance of basic school-level mathematics. Claims that don’t even understand the difference between a million and a billion. They will tell me that evolution is a cat turning into a dog. They will tell me that DNA is “just carbon.” And then when I tell them that the Bible demands accurate and honest weights and measures (see for example, Deuteronomy 25:13-16), they will tell me that I’m taking those verses out of context – an assertion that is tantamount to flat-out demanding the right to tell lies.

As for teaching Genesis as written, I’m sorry but young earth creationism does not teach Genesis as written. It teaches a cartoon caricature of Genesis as written with a thick layer of science fiction slathered on top of it, with billion-fold accelerated nuclear decay, tectonic plates breaking the motorway speed limit, sauropod dinosaurs on board Noah’s Ark, giants fighting T-Rexes in colosseums, and stuff even more whacked out than that. I’m sorry, but whatever you take out of Genesis 1, I’m pretty sure that it isn’t trying to tell us that The Flintstones, Lord of the Rings and Star Trek are documentaries.

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When these same Christians ask, why can I see so many craters, and craters in craters, on the moon, how do you answer? When young people ask where did the dinosaurs go, how do you reply? Do you tell them that such questions are not allowed? Just sit down and listen to your pastor?

BioLogos, or mainstream science for that matter, is not forcing people to ask questions which involve science. They are obvious and present themselves.

Are there differing version of theology? Different understandings of scripture? And are there not also differing views of science? Of data? Is one view absolutely wrong and another absolutely correct? I think BioLogos is highly committed and heavily entrenched in the science evolution, and AIG is another view of the science and the data the earth shows us. Both BioLogos and AIG and YEC and whatever other labels

  • all have faults. None of us has enough answers to declare truth on materialistic matters. I certainly do not, and have faith in the Bible as a foundation of truth first of all, knowing that the gospel of Jesus Christ is sufficient. Regarding man’s knowledge of the material world …the 700+ fields of the sciences will catch up with the Bible someday.

It’s not like that.

From earlier,

 
Do you interpret gravity differently, too? Or radio, television and cell phone radio waves? If you interpret radar transmissions differently, that would not do well for airplane or weather safety.

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Yes, the good news of Jesus Christ is sufficient for salvation. That is why it is absolutely false to say that evolution is inconsistent with salvation. My hope is bult on nothing less than Jesus and His righteousness! If we agree on this, we are fine.

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People should still teach Genesis as written without evolution. But without made up creation science as well. If pastors stuck to the text, they wouldn’t be contradicting known facts of nature, it’s when they impose answers to scientific questions or insert their own modern inferences that they end up teaching stuff that is demonstrably wrong.

You don’t. You need a deep understanding of science to get science correct and you need to not learn science from the Bible, because the Bible doesn’t teach science.

Which is why we shouldn’t rely on science to tell us Jesus is Lord and his Kingdom is coming. The gospel is God’s wisdom. Creation science is not God’s wisdom, and there is no verse in the Bible that claims people should reject the insights of brilliant humans on every topic, just because they are not God, or just because they make a claim about something true that isn’t found in the Bible.

Your faith is totally valid. Nobody is saying people are saved by knowledge of science or that God requires a certain understanding of scientific facts in order to speak through his word or relate to humanity.

This was my experience examining the claims of young earth science. I had the opposite experience digging into the details of the compatibility of evolution with Christian faith. It reduced so much tension and resolved many issues for me.

Why? No one is saying you have to understand science to have a testimony about encountering God or to have faith in Christ’s work on the cross and resurrection. James is saying if you are going to call Christian scientists liars when they are doing their jobs and using their hard won expertise, you should know what you are talking about, not simply slander them out of ignorance.

No one is doing that. People are saying that faith doesn’t produce measurements of the age of the earth. Measuring the age of the earth does. And there are valid and invalid ways to take measurements. People are saying faith doesn’t propose a model for the distribution of fossils in rock strata. Faith doesn’t do calculations or organize empirical observations into patterns that confirm or disprove hypotheses and make testable predictions.

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So YECs are deliberately injecting falsehoods into the scriptures? From your “deeper” understanding of the sciences, you conclude that another fellow Christian is deliberately deceiving the church? Should the uneducated not stand up for their beliefs? You are obviously taking a stand and claiming it is correct - or more correct. It sounds like a slippery slope, when so much of evolution’s “theories”, conjectures, and extrapolations of data are filled with assumptions. I’m not saying it’s all wrong, it just seems to me BioLogos has heavy bias to trust and believe the concepts of evolution - which seem to me to be man’s recent ideas. You can point to all kinds of examples of how this and that adapted and changed, or throw millions of years at an evolutionary process to make it seem plausible, but it’s hard for me to see that as “evidence”. So that’s the way I talk to my circle of humans about this. I say that I do not have the answers, but evolution is full of problems and questions, so I’ll stick to basic simple faith in what Genesis says. Does that make me a dishonest believer? Will there be judgement for me because I choose to stick to my views of Genesis? I don’t have time or the interest to study ancient languages, and I will not scrap my understanding of Genesis just to trust someone who claims they are an expert and knows everyone else for the last 2,000 or was understand it wrong. Truth is the sciences are so fragmented complex studies that few understand another field to judge it’s truth. And so, the narratives of cosmology and evolution take on a life of their own and grow and grow into worldviews that are simply accepted as truth.
Who are you really placing your trust in? Have you studied every field of the sciences of evolution, and linguistics, and theology, and then also been led in your personal relationship with God through the Holy Spirit to make these claims? If so, can we still be brothers in Christ, and not denigrate each other, saying judgement is coming for you? I hope so.

No they won’t for the simple reason that the Bible is not a science book.

The “science” (really just observations of the natural world) that is contained in the Bible is quite often wrong. Or do you believe:
The sun circles around the earth.
The moon generates it’s own light.
The earth is flat, supported by pillars.
There is a dome over the earth with water above.
Heaven is located above this dome.
Men provide the seed and women just provide a place for the seed to grow.
etc. etc.

So there are Christian YEC/AIG scientists too, “doing their jobs, using their hard won expertise.” Humm… who to believe? Flip a coin I guess.

Well, we are claiming they don’t actually have scientific expertise. Many don’t have any training in science and the ones who do often got their degrees decades ago and have not kept up in their fields or are consistently corrected by their peers for serious errors.

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Not just me … but millions of believers today who work in the sciences and are a lot smarter than me.

Well good … sticking to what Genesis says is a great thing to do. But when you start talking about “evolution being full of problems and questions”, you aren’t sticking to Genesis. You’re venturing into science, and it’s probably best not to make these sorts of scientific pronouncements if you feel shy about coming up to speed on such things yourself. While there are always lots of questions surrounding any scientific field, the line “evolution has lots of problems” tends to be delivered with an apologetic intent to suggest a scientific critique - more of an attempted “take-down” really, that you are unwilling to substantiate, and that others have failed to substantiate. People who have looked into these matters can see that. So when they correct such things (like young-earth creationist Todd Wood has), and yet those things still get repeated - that’s what I mean by knowingly injecting falsehood.

Just stick with Genesis and you’ll be fine. I’m glad you are willing to see me/us as followers of Christ along with you. That kind of welcome is what so many believing scientists would love to have, without all the anti-evolutionary-science strings attached to it.

I appreciate your humility. Most all of us can use more of that than we typically exhibit.

-Merv

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If you had a potentially life-threatening cancer, and somehow had the luxury of getting hundreds of opinions from hundreds of doctors … and you make sure every last one of them are all Christian because - yeah. And then you discover that two or three of them have looked over your situation and are recommending homeopathic remedies - think happy thoughts.

But all the rest of the hundreds of doctors say “no - that’s nuts! We can easily remove that, treat you, and you’ve got really high chances of coming through this just fine.”

You look a little further into the three doctors and discover that one of them is really a chiropractor. And the other two are a dentist and then also an engineer who has a bent toward believing medical conspiracy and a hobby-interest in fringe medical practice. All the other hundreds of doctors are currently practicing cancer specialists who’ve been keeping up with the latest literature.

You just gonna flip a coin?

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To be fair, I think we need to give you some specific examples here, @Geneo, and to explain exactly what is unconvincing if not dishonest about them. Let’s take a look at AIG’s ten best evidences for a young earth for starters. You can find a complete review of those claims here:

A couple of highlights:

Claim number 7: Radiocarbon in fossils, coals and diamonds.

Answers in Genesis claims that findings of carbon-14 in ancient coals and diamonds demonstrate that the coals and diamonds must be much younger than millions of years old. However, the levels that they are reporting are about 0.1-0.7% modern carbon for ancient coals, and up to 0.025% modern carbon for diamonds. These levels are fully consistent with known, measured, and well studied contamination mechanisms.

Answers in Genesis, however, dismisses contamination as a “rescuing device.” This is not acceptable by any standard whatsoever. One of the most basic, fundamental rules of science is that you must fully account for all possible sources of error before drawing any conclusion. In fact, in any other area of science, if you were to dismiss contamination as a “rescuing device,” you would kill people.

Basically, what they are doing here is asking for a free pass to claim whatever they like. No responsible scientist would even think of giving in to such a demand.

Claim number 3: soft tissue in dinosaur fossils.

One of the most fundamental, basic rules of science is that before you make any claims about how you can or cannot interpret evidence, you must get your facts straight about what the evidence actually consists of. Soft tissue in dinosaur fossils is one particular area where we see YEC misrepresentation time and time and time again.

Mary Schweitzer did not find actual red blood cells. She only found long-lived durable breakdown products from red blood cells, such as heme molecules. Similarly, the soft tissue was not unpermineralised: she had to soak it in demineralising solution for a week to get at it. She did not find DNA and certainly not sequenceable DNA, but again only breakdown products that indicated that DNA had once been present. Osteocytes? Nope, only structures the same size and shape as osteocytes that again had been chemically altered into a much more durable form. And I could go on.

It is simply not honest to claim that breakdown products of something are that something itself.

Claim number 2: bent rock layers

This one is a doozy. There is a rock formation in the Grand Canyon that AIG obsesses over and that Andrew Snelling has visited on multiple occasions. AIG claims that because this rock formation had folded without fracturing, that meant it must have deformed into shape while it is wet. Yet there are photographs both on the AIG website and elsewhere on the Internet of the same rock formation showing clear evidence of fracturing in the very places where they claim that there isn’t any. In fact, the photo of this particular rock formation that they include on their article is badly focused and has people in the picture right in front of the most obvious fractures.

Once again, before you make any claims about how you can or cannot interpret evidence, you must describe the evidence itself accurately and honestly.

What does the Bible say about all this?

Deuteronomy 25:13-16:

¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

I’ve quoted this verse to YECs repeatedly to explain where I’m coming from. Yet every single time, I get the same response: an insistence that I am “taking these verses out of context.”

That is a fundamentally dishonest response.

If YEC science had any integrity, they would at least attempt to justify their approach to measurement, and to convince me that it was indeed accurate and honest and that maybe I had misunderstood something. Heck, even if they’d just come out with a tu quoque fallacy of “but evolutionists fudge measurements too,” I’d have been more impressed. But by arguing that the Bible’s demands for accurate and honest weights and measures do not apply to them, they are effectively demanding the right to flat-out lie. It also tells me that they know fine that they can’t justify their approach to weights and measures, but still insist that I must endorse their falsehoods anyway.

I’d just like to stress that these three examples I’ve given are not difficult to understand. The amount of scientific knowledge that you need to see what is wrong with them is trivial. It’s stuff that every teenager learns in school. And there are many, many other examples that I could cite. Examples that can be falsified with little more than a couple of Google searches and a back-of-the-envelope calculation using nothing more than high school mathematics. Sure, some of their claims are more complex and difficult to address, but if PhD scientists are coming out with falsehoods, fallacies and errors as blatant as these, why should we consider their treatment of the more advanced stuff to be any better?

So how should you challenge a scientific theory, then?

As I’ve said, any challenge to any scientific theory must consist of honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information. This means in particular:

  • Your account of the theory must be accurate. You must not try to debunk an inaccurate cartoon caricature of evolution or scientific methodology that no real scientist does or teaches (e.g. “a cat turning into a dog” or “fossils are used to date rocks and rocks are used to date fossils”); you must challenge what actually gets taught about it in schools and universities.
  • Your account of the evidence must be accurate. You must not claim that evidence (such as transitional fossils) does not exist when quite clearly it does. Especially not when you can discover the evidence with nothing more than a simple Google search.
  • Your quotations must be accurate. You must make sure that they accurately reflect the context from which they were taken as well. Taking quotes out of context in ways that misrepresent their context is called “quote mining,” and it is universally regarded as a form of lying.
  • Your measurements must be accurate. Again, Deuteronomy 25:13-16. And I’m sorry, but that applies to every context in which measurement is used. No exceptions, no excuses.

It’s as simple as this. Science has rules and honesty has rules. If YEC scientists don’t want to be accused of lying, they need to stick to the rules.

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Actually, the Bible had a lot to do with my rejection of YEC.

There are two creation stories with different orders and methods of creation.

This is clear evidence directly from the Bible that shows the early chapters of Genesis are not literal history.

For example, the second creation story (which begins in Genesis 2.4b) says that man was formed before any plants had sprung up. And it says man was alone so God created the animals.

So the scriptures reveal that YEC is wrong in the first two chapters of Genesis!

And Judges 3:24

The scientific method exists to test which views of the natural world are correct and which are wrong. That is what sets it apart from mere opinion or philosophy.

Close enough at times. Would you agree that the idea that bleeding will cure contagious disease by restoring balance between blood, bile, and phlegm, is absolutely wrong? Would you agree that the earth absolutely revolves around the sun? Is it absolutely correct that materials cannot be divided indefinitely as eventually you reach down to atoms? All of this understanding is due to science. What we have learned about nature did not stop centuries ago; current science is still revealing basic truth about nature.

Most of what YEC organizations put out are neither scientific nor in the Bible. The Bible does not speak of speeded up nuclear decay; magnetic reversals and speeding tectonic plates are nowhere to be found in scripture.

Specialization is a reality in science. But most scientists will start off as students in year one university studying the foundations of chemistry, biology, and physics before even beginning to narrow their focus. That does not make them into authorities in these other fields, but it does enable them to generally discern the experts from the crackpots. With appropriate dedication and reading, the same can be said for laypeople.

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