This made me think of a guest lecturer when I was in grad school, a recognized expert on the Gospel of John. He knew the text well enough that you could cut a small randomly-shaped piece out of any page of the Gospel in Greek and he would be able to tell where it was from, and he understood it thoroughly.
We weren’t told beforehand that he was an atheist, and when we were told some of my fellow students were insistent that he must have been a Christian once because only a Christian could understand the scriptures that well – and besides, why would an atheist study the Gospel of John? But they were wrong; he’d never been a Christian, yet he understood John’s writing as well as the best Christian scholars, the only difference being that he didn’t believe it. This was especially troubling to some because John explicitly stated that he wrote in order that people might believe.
Which is to illustrate that subject matter experts don’t have to be Christians even when their expertise is in the scriptures.
Where is that said in the scriptures?
Nobody is saying that God is restricted to science. God can choose whether to use miraculous un-explainable means, or means explainable by human scientific observation. All we are saying is that, in the case of the creation of the earth and humans, there is evidence that God chose to create using means that are explainable by human science.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is a miracle, and nobody here is disputing that. Just because the resurrection of Jesus is a miracle, that doesn’t mean God exclusively works in ways humans can’t explain.
So where does the Bible say you must accept a particular human interpretation? In fact, where does Jesus say you must obey the original 10 commandments? Pretty sure He reduced them to 2. Neither of which addressed the age of the earth.
True and is actually what I believe but Genesis doesn’t tell us WHEN. Science can tell us the when but the how is still open to debate.
No one has ever restricted God “to” science. God is the source of science and the natural laws that govern His universe. It is by using God’s natural laws that we can tell the age of the universe.
Seeing how Christ is God He can pretty much do what ever He wills. Want to discuss how many angles can dance on the head of a pin? It is an equally good question.
Did Jesus break any natural (scientific) laws when he calmed the storm on Galilee? Did he need to?
Many devout Christians down through the centuries have treated much of the Bible as allegorical, others have examined the Hebrew text of Genesis and concluded that the universe and the Earth are far more ancient than a few thousand years, others have treated Genesis as mythology, and despite your claims they were all good Christians.
YEC doesn’t show up historically until about the time of the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, or so, and his conclusion that the world was created in 4,004 B.C. But he was working from just one textual tradition; there are others where the date got worked out to (approximately) 3,900 B.C., 5,200 B.C., 5,500 B.C., 6,900 B.C., 11,000 B.C., and even 12,500 B.C. That all these different figures can be calculated depending on what ancient manuscripts are used strongly indicates that God doesn’t really care about the age of the Earth, which should be a warning to not get lost in such foolish musings.
That’s an error that arose from poor translation on the part of the KJV translators.
Now you’re inventing things and adding them to the scriptures.
I would think that the answer for going to speed of light is “No” since even after the Resurrection Jesus had a physical body that would have been constrained by the rules God applies to this universe – but at the same time the question would be why He would need to since reasonably He could just translocate.
“Angles . . . on the head of a pin.” There aren’t any; the head of a pin is round.
“Angels on the head of a pin” was really a question about the nature of angels, specifically whether they by nature take up physical space, which for some reason was important to scholastic theology. A physics grad student in my university days said it depends on whether they’re in their ground state and whether angels are a quantum phenomenon – a clever way to dismiss the question.
It’s an interesting question given the link between that event and several Old Testament references to Yahweh calming storms: if He didn’t ‘break’ any laws, is it actually a demonstration of God’s power?
Depends on the pin. Dressmaker pins have a flat head.
It rather more than suggests who is sovereign over creation… (and YECs think Christians who endorse evolution deny that).
I’m trying to recall how sharp the edges on those heads were – I’ve handled thousands of them in my life but haven’t so much as seen one for thirty years.
[For that matter I know how they were made back in the colonial period . . . ]
“Samuel said to king Saul: To obey is better than to sacrifice”. And if we read all of Exodus 20, we come to “You shall not bear false witness.” Similarly, the Great Commission tells the disciples to be Christ’s witnesses. Note also Paul’s serious concern to not be a false witness about God in I Cor. 15 and his admonition about those presuming to teach that which they neither know nor understand in I Tim. 1. Job warned his friends that God will not condone partiality, even if it is partially towards God in Job’s contention. A witness is charged with telling what one knows truthfully. That is obedience.
Jesus did not say “You will be my PR agents.” Spin, exaggeration, commercials - these are false witness. Like sacrifice without obedience, making false promotional claims about God puts show ahead of substance and dishonors Him. For example, I have seen the claim that we should assert that things happened miraculously rather than following natural laws because that supposedly gives more glory to God. Besides the fact that one might actually be more impressed at God being able to work things within the constraints of using natural law than just zapping them into happening, claiming something is true when you don’t really know is dishonest and mars God’s glory.
Sadly, both YEC and ID focus on impressing the public rather than on credible witness. Atheists sometimes joke that leading YEC are actually covert atheists seeking to discredit religion from within. YEC promotes arguing about genealogies, rather than actually pointing to Christ, to return to I Tim. 1.
Although more figurative interpretations of Genesis were quite prevalent in the early church and medieval times, the earth was generally thought to be young on either historical grounds or chiliasm. Early Christians were rightly skeptical of the historical reliability of mythical claims from ancient near eastern cultures about humans extending back into the distant past. One particular form of chiliasm that gained great popularity in the 2nd century AD took “a day is like a thousand years” (Ps. 90, also quoted by Peter) to mean that the six days of creation corresponded to 6 1000 years periods for total earth history. Often, it was assumed that the birth of Jesus inaugurated one of these thousand year intervals, putting creation at either 4000 or 5000 years before Jesus. The influence of this can still be seen in Ussher’s date, reflecting the widely-held belief that 4 BC is the best date for Jesus’ birth. That is problematic, however, as it implies that the second coming was in 1997.
The 1500’s and 1600’s saw renewed interest in historical understanding - the Reformation promoted more historical rather than figurative interpretations; the fall of Constantinople has brought a number of ancient manuscripts west, growing economic development gave more people time to focus on scholarly pursuits, etc. Several people sought to produce an overall history of the earth. Although the Bible was the prime source of information, available Greek and Roman sources were used as well. Ussher’s effort was one of the most scholarly and widely accepted; Isaac Newton is probably the most famous person to make a similar effort. (Note that modern conventions for expressing uncertainty in numbers had not yet developed; the fact that the date estimates ranged from before 5000 to under 4000 BC seems to have been viewed as variation among reasonable efforts.) The noticing of Pompeii in the late 1500’s helped lead to the addition of archaeological evidence to these histories. It was realized, for example, that finding a coin somewhere with a picture of Julius Caesar suggested that the area had contact with the Romans in the first century BC, even without documentary evidence for this. In the 1660’s, Steno published, pointing out that one could apply similar common-sense reasoning to putting rock and sediment layers in order. By the late 1600’s, early geologists were beginning to suspect that the rock evidence pointed to a lot of time, but this evidence did not become conclusive until the 1770’s. Meanwhile, “Enlightenment” thinking had re-popularized the old pagan idea of earth, complete with humans, going through countless cycles. Geology, however, pointed to a more linear (though squiggly) course of earth history, with extensive pre-human time, and the Enlightenment cycles were gradually abandoned (though, regrettably, not the Enlightenment myth that the Enlightenment was the source of scientific progress)… The geological data were generally accepted as showing that the Bible skipped over a large chunk of time that was theologically unimportant between the initial creation and the creation of humans. By the 1840’s, Michael Tuomey was referring to the perception that an old earth was a problem for the Bible as a thing of the past.
I think you are right. However, I don’t think it was that way in their minds. I remember being told by people I respected very much (still do) that the Bible (as we understood it) was absolute truth, and that all others would melt away. To come from an area that is non oriented to the portions of science that have to do with old earth, evolution, etc, and objectively make a pronouncement (many of these folks are well trained in other areas), is really hard, I think. It’s taken me 30 years (I’m now 52) to really get comfortable with evolution–and I confess, I still struggle a ton with conflicting with Bible accounts.
Thanks.
Yes. Although there are doubtless some quacks deliberately peddling errors, it is often a misguided focus.
There’s some truth to that since historically YEC came from the infection of the church by the philosophy of scientific materialism, specifically its premise that in order for something to be true it has to be 100% scientifically (and historically) accurate – a standard of truth that cannot be found in the Bible and for the Old Testament for the most part if alien to it. So YEC is actually founded on a premise from an inherently atheistic worldview.
I’d totally forgotten about Steno!
I found it interesting that at least one published science text for schools ignored his existence, a fact probably explained by its source at a publishing house with an anti-Catholic head.
That’s important because it demonstrates that dating of rocks was not done to accommodate evolution.
I think I was fortunate in that I already recognized that the Genesis Creation accounts were in literary genres not meant to be taken literally before I actually studied science, and that I studied geology heavily enough to know that there is no avoiding an ancient earth before I really looked at evolution.
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