How do you know?
You suddenly don’t know what a YEC is? C’mon.
I don’t get the impression Buggs would put scarequotes around that.
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He could be a day-age creationist.
It’s widely recognised by most Christians and Hebrew scholars who aren’t YECs that the word for a “day” in Genesis 1 is ambiguous and doesn’t necessarily refer to a 24 hour solar day.
Thanks. I am aware of this interpretation (and would have said that instead of YEC if that was what I meant)*, but completely unconvinced that Buggs subscribes to it. And I wonder where Swamidass gets his confidence that I’m misreading him.
So far I haven’t seen anything that indicates Buggs swings more towards that idea, than just plain old YEC.
- Why would anyone refer to day-age Creationism as young-Earth Creationism anyway? Young Earth, old universe perhaps?
I’m skeptical of the creative power of evolution via natural selection alone. I’m thinking there’s has to be God’s design someway, somehow in biology. It may look like Intelligent design or evolutionary creationism or maybe a little bit of both.
I’d be more inclined to leave it as an open question.
People who really do subscribe to plain old YEC tend to make at least some references to YECs’ favourite talking points such as dinosaur soft tissue or radiocarbon in ancient coals and diamonds. Is there any indication that he has done so, or are we just going on his remarks about “the first day of creation” and “the beginning of creation” and Adam and Eve?
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YouTube - Buggs responding to questions after church presentation
Buggs responding to questions…
33:11 Can you believe in evolution and be a Christian?
34:28 What about people who argue we evolved from apes?
35:50 How do you explain the age of the earth and reconcile this with the Bible?
He more or less answered with general comments about the range of positions on these questions without revealing much of where he stands himself.
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I am. I don’t know what he believes, that’s why I’m asking. And given his statements in that debate combined with the fact that he is an ID proponent (many, if not the majority of which are YEC (the one where the name makes sense because they believe the Earth is Young and they’re Creationists)), that really just makes the best case for him not being a YEC totally ambiguous. I haven’t heard him clearly state what is position is anywhere.
He’s an evolutionary biologist by training, and is publishing phylogenetic trees on, well, the relationships of trees(the plants). Okay. Does that mean he actually believes the Earth and life on it is old and shares a common genealogical relationship, and that consilience of independent phylogenies is good evidence of that?
The fact that NONE of his youtube videos or blog posts on phylogenetic methods actually indicates that, is, to me, a significant hint. All his popular-audience level output on that topic speaks only and exclusively about things he thinks are problems with phylogenetic inference. He says nothing in favor of those methods, and nothing on the common ancestry of all life on Earth. Might he accept that certain more restricted clades are related, based in part on phylogenetic inference? We don’t know, he never says.
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36:28: “As far as I can see, the Bible doesn’t make any direct claims about how old the Earth is. There is no verse of the Bible that says that the Earth is x number of years old. And, among Christians, Genesis chapter 1 is read in a whole variety of different ways, and only one of those ways says that the Earth can only be a few thousand years old. So I think the Bible simply doesn’t make a claim about the age of the Earth.”
He is no YEC. No YEC would say that. The entire premise of YEC is a denial that the Bible leaves anything whatsoever open to interpretation about the age of the Earth.
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Evolution doesn’t work by natural selection alone; that’s been obvious for decades. That’s one of the most common misrepresentations of evolution by creationists.
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Then you are not a creationist, not even an old-earth creationist.
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