Remember that Satan was telling Jesus that He should do more miracles. In the biblical accounts, and in other data on history, including personal experience, it is clear that miracles setting aside natural laws are rare. John refers to miracles as “signs” - they have specific theological function of pointing to God. In crossing the Sea, Exodus records God sending a wind - the miracle was in having just the right timing of just the right wind to set up a seiche exactly when needed. Axe heads don’t naturally float, but it had to be picked up and fastened on better. There is a fish in the Sea of Galilee that tends to pick up shiny things, but Jesus knew where one was with exact change. People sink if they try to walk on water, but even if you don’t sink, trekking across a few miles of waves would not be easy. Bread and fish were multiplied, and the leftovers carefully saved. The pattern is minimizing the miraculous component to what is necessary. Even for spiritual things - an angel and a vision are used to get Peter talking to Cornelius, not direct revelation of the gospel. We should not invoke miracles all over the place, but rather take seriously whether they are theologically reasonable.
That doesn’t mean that a “natural” explanation is inherently better. Even the relatively liberal commentary I saw it mentioned in was skeptical of the claim that Elijah was actually pouring lighter fluid, not water, over his altar. Where did Elijah get the technology to refine hydrocarbons? A study noted that springs in the Sea of Galilee mean that local patches of the lake are fresher (and thus could freeze more easily) than average for the lake. True enough. But the proposal that such would allow apparent walking on water is ridiculous. The storm would not only mean that the water would be mixed around (not promoting forming a patch of ice), but also would make trying to use a small bit of ice as a surfboard impossible.
As ID advocates admit when they are trying to claim that their position is purely scientific, finding some sort of gap within the course of creation would not indicate who the designer(s) were. But that does not fit with the purpose of miracles being signs specifically pointing to God.
The miracles claimed by creation science are not in the Bible, but rather are what is needed to cover over the problems with their scientific claims. The reality is that the scientific evidence plainly supports a vast age for the earth. The physical evidence is that the miracles claimed in young-earth sources did not happen. Even more problematic theologically, the entire function of many of the miracles is to make it look like the supposed young-earth event did not happen.
If God did create the earth instantaneously a few thousand years ago, there would be no need to produce a huge number of features that make the earth look like it has a lengthy history. Why stick atoms in rocks that fit the decay patterns for billions of years of history? There’s no point.
This reminds of well-meaning attempts to explain discrepancies in the Biblical text that go beyond the text to explain what was “actually going on.” I am specifically thinking of someone who came to the conclusion that Peter had not denied Jesus three times, but six times, to reconcile discrepancies between the different Gospel accounts. I don’t see a problem with trying explain or reconcile discrepancies in the Biblical text, but it can go too far and give the impression that it is the scenario that we create behind the text and not the text itself that is authoritative, which in a way is self-defeating to those who are trying to defend the authority of scripture. A lot of YEC scenarios have whiffs of this thinking, for example explaining the flood with miracles with “scientific” models that are not supported by current data and rely on invoking miracles that are not in even in the Bible. It would be one thing if YEC models for flood geology, baraminology, etc., were actually making correct predictions and giving better explanations than consensus models, but the fact that YECists have to resort increasingly to explicit extra-Biblical miracles suggests that they are not really talking about the authority of scripture at this point. They are talking about the scenario they have constructed with their theology which they are trying to fit into scripture and into the natural world.
For what it’s worth, this is one of the things that bugs me the most about young earthism. Time and time again I find that when I’m confronted with young earth claims, it’s not philosophical or theological questions that I’m having to address, nor is it complex and arcane postgraduate level science. Rather, it’s very elementary basic principles that apply to every area of science and that I would expect any reasonably intelligent high school student to understand.
I sometimes even find I’m having to make such elementary basic points to people who have (or at least claim to have) far more experience and education in various scientific fields than I do myself. On one occasion I had to point out to a young earthist who claimed to have forty years’ experience at a top US nuclear research laboratory the simple, basic fact that nuclear decay generates heat.
What you are saying is that the facts are trivial. It would be very refreshing if you would admit this on a more regular basis. The evidence doesn’t support YEC which is why miracles have to be invented in order to make the contradictory evidence go away.
YEC’s are not interpreting the same data. They are inventing miracles as a way of justifying their rejection of the data.
That’s an insightful observation! It fits with how God isn’t recorded as doing miracles all over the place but only in times that are critical for His people. Miracles abound around the Exodus, but pop up only occasionally during the times of the kingdom(s) and the prophets, then practically explode during the Incarnation, primarily during the Ministry period, and that continues into the expansion of the church.
C. S. Lewis said something quite similar.
It’s impossible anyway: an area of ice the size of a surfboard can only support someone if it is on the order of two meters thick. Twenty centimeters of ice will hold a person up, but only if it is part of a large solid sheet – and either of those cases it takes weeks of sub-freezing temperatures achieve.
Which makes them “science fantasy” – an interesting genre, but not one that was found before the last century.
Not only no point, but it’s deceptive – such an entity would not be Yahweh but Satan.
A very astute observation! I’ve heard it as defending the original text, but if that’s so then the original text had to have been drastically different than what we have, and there’s no evince for that.
Well stated.
That waste of life is one that bugs me. I think that if the money spent on YEC enterprises was instead spent to provide every Christian with $5 worth of materials that actually prsent the Gospel then – assuming those all got used! – the results would be millions of new Christians . . . whereas I have yet to see one person brought to Christ because of YEC but plenty driven away.
Sociologically this is because in popular movements everything gets dumbed down to the typical level of understanding. In the U.S., the average/typical literacy level is equivalent to sixth grade (eighty percent lack the vocabulary to read a regular newspaper!); science literacy falls below even that. I read not long ago that for a populace to be able to make decisions concerning matters of science a functional equivalent of a high school sophomore education is an absolute minimum – yet in the U.S. the typical adult is over five years below that (which statistically puts the population overall a good ten years short).
It would be better if they’d actually make an ark, which in Hebrew (and the rest of the ANE for that matter) was a box, chest, or coffin – rectangular all around.
I heard a great description of a church building from an Antiochene Orthodox priest: it’s an embassy, where the ground and floor inside are legally the soil of the country that owns it, where the laws of that country prevail rather than those of the host country. It struck me because I once had occasion to visit the German consulate in San Francisco, and the receptionist had the duty to inform everyone that across the threshold it was German territory, and thus German law was in force, not U.S. or California law.
If you have hung around YEC for a while, you will probably encounter some reference to polonium halos. These were championed by the late creationist Robert Gentry who asserted that they were premoidial and made in the creation week, although nothing in particular to do with the flood. That idea was refuted by mainstream scientists, but the spike through the heart was really driven by AiG head of research, Andrew A. Snelling, who had designs on halos as evidence for accelerated nuclear decay during the flood.
The implications of these conclusions are highly significant, because they are fatal to Gentry’s fiat Creation hypothesis for the origin of the Po radiohalos.
Snelling’s argument is long and technical, which likely suited his purpose, because to his audience it looks scientific and thorough, so I was interested in how he dealt with the heat that is ground zero when it comes to these halos. After all, halos are damage from alpha ( Helium nucleus ) particles that are emitted at around 5% of the speed of light and crash around until all the kinetic energy has been spent to heat. Given billions of years there is plenty of time for that heat to dissipate, and that heat budget presents no problem to geology. Concentrated within a few months however, and the picture is very different.
This is equivalent to a temperature rise of more than 22,000°C, which is sufficient, of course, to vaporize a granitic pluton many times over. … The biotite crystal and the zircon grain included in it would be vaporized! So whichever way the calculation is made, there is no denying that there is a genuine heat problem associated with accelerated nuclear decay. … Incredible amounts of heat must have somehow been removed rapidly by a process or processes that we have not yet discovered or understood, for otherwise these rocks and the radiohalos in them would have been vaporized!
Note that this statement is from the RATE project itself. Of course, Snelling still maintains that halos are evidence of accelerated decay, and leaves solving the heat problem for a rainy day, even though in his own paper he maintains that halos must form below a threshold of 150°C, let alone an gaseous 22,000°C. It has been almost two decades, and the heat problem has proved intractable even to the fervid imaginations of YEC.
