And I yours. A young but vast universe. Or not.
I like Michael Strauss’ scientific interpretation of reality better.
The focus of the passage may be just as you say, but here’s what the 1 Peter verses say:
17 If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth ; 18 knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, 19 but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. 20 For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you
He, being foreknown, since before the foundation of the world, say a couple of thousand years ago doesn’t make for very good imagery, does it? Our time on earth is set against the span of time from creation until the last days. It is clear, to me anyhow, that there is a great divide intended here, else the writer would have used another literary device.
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Respectfully, i am finding these basic principles of biblical interpretation to be atrocious. There is reading a text, and reading into a text.
the “time of our stay on earth” during which we ought to personally be conducting ourselves in reverent fear, usually ranges between some 50-90 years on average. This will be exactly the same regardless if the universe is 5000 years old or 105000 years old.
(not to mention, that when we start talking about what God was doing or planning “before the foundation of the world”, we have entered into the realm of timelessness, no?)
If you take the ancient Earth view the vast majority of the species types sprang into life in a comparatively short period of time and many died out during an even shorter. Now both of these events, in the old Earth view are a lot longer than in young Earth theory, but if you compress the time line of the old Earth view, the two pretty much say the same thing for both reflect the actual evidence but seen through two different lenses of preconceived beliefs. It is just that the Bible says it happened in days and then a year verses tens of thousands of years for creation and then decades for extinction.
In fact, one massive event is believed to be the main cause in both extinction time lines.
Atheism speaks of a comet or other event changing our atmosphere and causing several ice ages where huge shelves of ice moved huge bounders about.
Christianity speaks of a world wide flood doing the same, though atheism of course mocks the very idea of water that deep everywhere while looking at world record in size glaciers as the conjectural cause instead. While all too often the old Earth view is supported by mockery and insult and even laughter rather in demonstrable science as it is impossible to repeat nor measure what actually occurred and thus impossible to prove any of our theories, either way.
Therefore there is no proof of either way!
We have the evidence of what can be found and measured, this is science and what can be observed and proven which is also science.
What cannot be proven is why those huge boulders were moved and what dug out those huge canyons. The currently observed processes or things that surpass everything that we have ever observed. While even the multiple ice age theories surpass what we can see by quite a bit in size of the lands covered and even overall depth of the ice.
So the key factor is, does God exist, yes or no?
Because if you leave out even the most remote possibility of God then you of course build your origin models with current processes as your guide and only alter these to the minimum extent necessary to maintain congruence with what is currently observed.
As for Carbon dating, this is not used much anymore as a bone fragment that came from a horse that had died less than a century before was once dated to be a half million years old!
Most fossils are dated by the layer of rock they are found in and most layers of rock are dated by the fossils found in them. Those fossils that are independently dated that do not match the conjectural ages of the rock layers are tossed out as abnormalities. While mammal and other fossils found at much deeper and conjecturally older layers are assumed to be precursors of species rather than the idea that they actually lived side by side with the older species from the beginning. While the Biblical view is that the great extinction event was in fact the Flood of Noah that lasted only about one year. While there is evidence buried in coal that humans in fact lived before these mass extinctions.
In fact this bell was found embedded in coal that is supposedly millions of years old!
As for keystone species I will first talk about cats. Tigers and lions once lived side by side in some historical texts, but one or the other began to dominate till there was no where on Earth that the two lived side by side outside of zoos today. The same can be demonstrated as larger cats continue to hunt cheetahs and panthers and would eventually wipe them out in most areas where bigger cats remain if humans did not intervene to preserve them.
While when it comes to insects, did you know there are over a thousand species, supposedly different species, of bugs all of which are easily identified as beetles! While the real truth of the matter is this, that varying breeds of dogs have nearly as many variations in both size and coloration as beetles have, so why do we call them different species when nature breeds them and breeds when humans breed them? While the common ancestor of dogs and wolves and foxes may in fact have been one, “common ancestor,” which was alive and well on the Ark with Noah.
How long does it take to create a new breed of dog, horse, cow?
The Morgan horse was created by finding a slightly smaller race horse and calling it a new breed and then breeding for this small, stout, fast characteristic. In fact most new breeds were created by mankind in forty years or less. So why do we think that nature is so less efficient than mankind?
To close let me tell you what the Bible is not nor will ever be.
The Bible is not a theory on how things happened!
It is the claim and part of the evidence on how God spoke with mankind and interacted with mankind and gave us the testimony of how the Universe and our world and mankind, all things in fact, began.
So the real test of authenticity is this, can the reality that is seen all about us line up with what the Bible says?
The fact that the fossil record exists does to a large extent line up with Bible claims!
For in a real world wide flood, smarter, faster animals would of course flee to higher ground and be far less likely to be buried or only be buried under less layers of deposited sediment. In fact the most intelligent might bypass small hills to flee to the higher with their bodies never being buried at all!
For me, the greatest difficulty is that natural history includes stories of lives lived in interesting ways:
The great migration out of Africa 50,000 years ago.
A girl who lived in a Russian cave with her Neanderthal mom and Denisovan dad 90,000 years ago.
A human community that used stone tools 315,000 years ago in Irhoud, Morocco.
T. Rex whose hunts were unsuccessful after a massive asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago.
These are but a tiny portion of the stories that left evidence we find today.
Yet you propose that these lives were never lived? That’s a bridge too far for me, Daniel.
Peace,
Chris
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Hahahaha. Very nice.
I agree that this is not the “point” we get from the text, but this is contained within the text, and is supposed to support the point of the text. Atrocious or not, a lifetime is juxtaposed to the time “before” in this passage. If this passage is 2000 years old, then some believe that the the creation was a mere 4000 years earlier. I don’t believe that you think that a lifetime relative to 4000 years is the same as a lifetime relative to many millions or billions of years (antiquity) do you? Especially given the fact that Adam seems to have lived 930 years, the span of which is approximately four Adam-lifetimes.
So, I stand by my point that one is supposed to understand this as deep time. Do you understand silver and gold as being “perishable” over 4000 years? Did the reader understand them as such?
The point that Dale was trying to make is that a biblical literalist feels that he has a monopoly on the truth and his interpretations are morally superior to all others. That’s simply not the case. This is a nuance of the text, but is an example of where a literal young earth perspective detracts from the significance of it. You are free to believe what you believe, and get what you get from reading the Bible. As I said:
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Would Adam have scars from cuts he never suffered? Would Adam have calcifications on his long bones from breaks he never suffered?
What we see in the night sky is a history of events, not an age. For example, there are jets coming out of black holes that are hundreds of thousands of light years in length. There are galactic interactions that chart millions of years of history.
What you are describing is the Omphalos theory that was popularized by Phillip Henry Gosse. Omphalos is Latin for bellybutton, with the question being would Adam have a bellybutton if he never had an umbilical cord. Gosse’s ideas didn’t sit well with many Christians. For example:
[I see that you addressed this in a later post after I wrote this. Your humble reply is very much appreciated.]
On a more theological level, if we can’t trust God’s creation to tell us an accurate story of history, then how can we trust God’s book? If God is willing to put fake events in the creation itself, then how can we believe the events in the Bible?
Would God create the Earth with fossils already in the ground? The rocks we are talking about are above fossils in the geologic column meaning that the fossils had to be there first. If you are saying that rocks date old because they are part of the original creation then the fossils have to part of that initial creation as well. If you are saying that fossils formed after the initial creation, then you can’t use the “created with age” as an explanation.
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indeed i would say not… that would be analogous to your very apposite question of whether God would have created Adam with “fake” scars or healed broken bones.
So on the one hand, there are certain aspects of instantaneous creation that i find would present the appearance of age, but which would imply no deception whatsoever… but then others wherein the features themselves would be deceitful.
i think the distinction in my mind is whether there is an implied history in the phenomenon. An instantaneously created Adam, or an instantaneously created fish, or bread, in and of itself, doesn’t seem to imply any particular history (beyond the fact that in our experience, any of those things would have had to have had a history). So granted, every man, fish, or piece of bread we are familiar with had some history, but there’s nothing about these things as they are that suggest any particular historical event, so I wouldn’t see these things being instantaneously created as somehow deceitful.
but then there are features of such things that would imply a specific history, or particular historical details… Adam with scars or healed bones… a newly created fish with a fishhook in its mouth, instantaneously created bread with a bite already taken out of it, or a world created with fossils.
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You seem to be vaguely implying a conclusion without getting there.
There are fossils in the ground, of course. So would you agree they are evidence of an earth that is billions of years old?
Peace,
Chris
“Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”
As stated, your argument or syllogism is a most obvious non sequitur, so of course I would not agree:
P: There are fossils in the ground.
C: The earth is billions of years old.
That conclusion clearly does not flow from that premise alone. Perhaps what you meant to suggest is something more akin to the following?
P1: There are fossils in the earth.
P2: Those fossils are billions of years old.
C: The earth is billions of years old.
The argument in that form would indeed have a conclusion that more clearly flows from those premises. But of course, YECs would dispute P2, and I for one am interested to hear their arguments on that.
(Especially given that the way we “know” a fossil is billions of years old is because it is buried in earth that is billions of years old, of course!)
Unfortunately, fossils like our jawbone, as well as the dinosaurs on view in the new “Fossil Hall—Deep Time” exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, are just too old for radiocarbon dating. In these cases, we have to rely on the rocks themselves. We date the rocks and by inference, we can date the fossils.
We know that in a sequence of sedimentary rock the older rock is on the bottom and the younger rock is on the top. It has to be in that order due to the way the rock layers are formed. Even the YEC use this basic principle.
If you accept radiometric dating then you can date the layers. You can be sure that any layer between two dated layers was created at some point in time between those dates. If those dates happen to be millions or billions of years ago whatever fossils you happen to find are also millions or billions of years old. This is why the YEC attack the dating method and not the position of the fossil.
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Sure, no essential dispute there. But then you can’t use the fossils as “evidence” that either those particular rocks, or the earth itself, is some billions of years old, as @Chris_Falter seemed to suggest. Attempting to do so would be circular reasoning.
Your argument throughout has been that radiometric dates cannot be accepted as “proof” of deep time IF one accepts that God can make anything unscarred seem as old as He wants it to appear.
The fossils, sandwiched as they are between layers of sedimentary rock that have radiometric dates of millions and billions of years old, are the “scars” pointing to stories of lives and deaths in various biological kingdoms.
I honestly thought that this attribute of fossils was so well known by literate adults that it did not need to be mentioned.
Now that I have patched up my grievous error in logic, please proceed.
Peace,
Chris
There are so many independent evidences for the antiquity of the earth, it is pretty mind-boggling. If someone doesn’t accept any of them, that is good evidence that their mind is boggled to begin with.
Where some of the elapsed time clocks God has engineered into creation for us to discover and learn how to use validate and verify each other’s calibration is a good place to start:
This is also a favorite, and it has nothing to do with radiometric dating of substances on earth. It also validates the consistency of the decay of radioactive nuclides:
Extinct Radioactive Atoms
Of course they are “scars,” and of course they present a history. No one would dispute that. But those for those YECs who claim the rocks themselves are young, the fossils cannot be “evidence” of an old earth. But these particular scars can only be dated to 50,000 years, not billions of years. Care to modify your original claim, that the fossils themselves are evidence of a world billions of years old?
the error, respectfully, is you are missing for some reason that YECs hardly dispute that fossils are a record of the “stories of lives and deaths in various biological kingdoms” , a record of “scars” from a world, according to their belief, some thousands of years old. They don’t believe they earth was created with false fossils, rather, the fossils were formed over the last 6,000 years or so, according to all YECs I’ve ever read.
Some 2 years after his creation, Adam may well have had a scar, or a calcified healing of a broken bone. but such “scars” would prove he had some history, rather than instantaneous creation (at least at that moment). but it wouldn’t “prove” that he had the age that the rest of his appearance would suggest. i.e., a scar would prove he had not just at that moment been instantaneously created; but it would hardly serve as “evidence” that he had to be decades old, rather than 2 years old.
So hopefully without being rude, let me spell it out…
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Person A believes the earth to be 60,000 years old…
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Person B believes the earth the be 6,000,000,000 years old.
how, exactly, does the existence of fossils, which themselves can be dated up to 50,000 years given the upper limit of C14 dating, serve as “evidence” that person B is correct and person A is in the wrong?
Glenn Morton’s @gbob’s postings were quite good (about worms making holes in multiple layers) and clearly proved against YEC; but many other evidences of varves, etc are pretty clear evidence of age much greater than 6,000 years that is without another purpose (eg, not maturity). I’d appreciate your thoughts on them. Thanks 
. Genesis is history and can't be forced to fit with evolutionary theory - #93 by jpm
The above is just a tiny slice of the information in this category.
Thank you. Because of your congeniality, it is always a pleasure to communicate with you, besides the content of our conversation.
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No 6,000 years old? 
So far, Daniel, you have entirely misunderstood what @Bill_II and I wrote. Let’s try a short quiz from Stratigraphy 101. I think you’ll be able to pass with flying colors.
Scenario: There is a geological column in Fisherville, Fisherstan. Layer 2 is late Devonian quartz with a radiometric date of 370±8Mya. Layer 4 is an late Silurian basalt with a radiometric date of 420±10Mya. Layer 3 is sedimentary so it cannot be dated with radiometric methods.
While constructing a skyscraper in Fisherville, workers dug down into Layer 3 and found some amazing fossils of lobe-finned fish.
Question: Based on radiometric dating, when did these lobe-finned fish live and die?
Hint: Scientists cannot date the sedimentary layer in which the fossils were found. Nor can they use radiometric dating on the fossils themselves. But don’t give up just yet! Can you use information from the layers above and below layer 3 to provide an upper and lower bound to the era when the lobe-finned fish were swimming?
Peace,
Chris