Common Misconceptions About Creation

From the AiG article:

You’ve probably seen artistic renderings of Noah’s ark and the garden of Eden. They typically depict modern animals that we see today—monkeys, elephants, and giraffes. Such drawings reveal the faulty assumption that early creatures looked like the ones we see today.

Many pictures show lions, tigers, and leopards on the ark. But these three cats came from a common ancestral cat kind, represented on the ark by a single pair (Genesis 7:2). These two cats would have contained the genetic information necessary for the various combinations we see today; therefore, they couldn’t have looked exactly like any of the cats we see today.

As I previously wrote on another site:
There are cave paintings showing Lions which dates far earlier than allowed under the Answers in Genesis timeline. Don’t like the dates? Consider that to have cave art depicting lions, in the big picture AiG model, requires that in the compass of time from Noah’s flood, algae blooms had to produce limestone deposits up to kilometers deep, those deposits then geologically crucibled to limestone, that limestone then up heaved to land, the now terrestrial and dry limestone subject to erosion to form the cave, the now eroded cave to be adorned with stalactites and stalagmites, and finally some talented artist to paint the European lions. All within the span of what, a couple hundred years or so?

There is Egyptian art, historically dated to before the AiG chronology for Noah’s flood, depicting lions, cheetahs, domestic cats, and leopards. Nathaniel Jeanson of AiG seriously proposes that some proto-cat pair disembarked the ark and within a handful of kitty litters produced not just those lions, cheetahs, domestic cats, and leopards, but also the saber toothed tigers of the tar pits and all the other cats which (d)evolved only to promptly go extinct. You do not have 4,500 years available for all this; all you have is ark disembark, a few generations, and bammm…house cats and lions. This does not just fail the test of science, this fails the test of common sense available to any lay person.

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I was surprised to read this well-worded quote about Thermodynamics!:

MISCONCEPTION: The Second Law of Thermodynamics Did Not Take Effect Until After the Fall
“The second law of thermodynamics states that closed systems tend toward increased entropy, or disorder. This law has led some to conclude that if things are running down, the second law of thermodynamics was not in effect until after the fall. After all, we can see the cumulative effects of the increasing disorder caused by sin.”

“However, such a conclusion assumes that all increased entropy is bad. In fact, entropy is responsible for many good things that happen every day—digestion, sunlight, breathing, walking uphill, warming cooled skin. The second law of thermodynamics refers to the transfer of heat and energy. Therefore, this law has been in effect since creation.”
[END OF QUOTED TEXT FROM THE ARTICLE]
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Young Earth Creationists Please Take note!

In the recent past I have written some postings (here or at BioLogos) about the counter-intuitive nature of thermodynamics! These postings have discussed the curious fact that a giant chaotic cosmic cloud of hydrogen does not act the way fans of thermodynamics expects it to act!:

  1. For those clouds that are sufficiently large and dense, as the cloud cools (a net loss of energy), gravitational forces begin to take over. Because the hydrogen loses its tendency to disperse as it cools, parts of the cloud can begin to contract gravitationally.

  2. This is the beginning of a new star, which ignites into a nuclear fury once the contracting cloud goes beyond the tipping point to begin fusion of hydrogen into helium!

  3. Once we have a burning sun, all bets are off regarding thermodynamics … since it will take billions of years for thermodynamics to have “the last laugh”, and destroy the new star. Thermodynamics does not work on Earth-like planets in isolation - - not when the planets are being bathed in the suns glowing energy for millions and millions of years.

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This seems to be an update of the “Arguments Creationists Should Not Use” page that was on AiG some years ago (~15 years?). This was an effort to encourage their followers not to use the arguments even AiG couldn’t swallow. :wink:

ETA: I found it on the Wayback Machine :slight_smile:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050225044559/http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp

‘The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall’. This law says that the entropy (‘disorder’) of the Universe increases over time, and some have thought that this was the result of the Curse. However, disorder isn’t always harmful. An obvious example is digestion, breaking down large complex food molecules into their simple building blocks. Another is friction, which turns ordered mechanical energy into disordered heat—otherwise Adam and Eve would have slipped as they walked with God in Eden! A less obvious example to laymen might be the sun heating the Earth—to a physical chemist, heat transfer from a hot object to a cold one is the classic case of the Second Law in action. Also, breathing is based on another classic Second Law process, gas moving from a high pressure to low pressure. Finally, all beneficial processes in the world, including the development from embryo to adult, increase the overall disorder of the universe, showing that the Second Law is not inherently a curse.

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One would think that the misconception that Jesus had light brown hair and blue eyes should have been neatly bundled with the same misconception about A&E. :innocent:

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Both the fall and the flood significantly impacted the world, transforming it from the perfect earth into the “groaning” one we know today.

I would think that if God intended to present the “pre-fall” earth as perfect, He would have ensured that the human author would have used a Hebrew word indicating such. He obviously didn’t. I’m not sure why this misconception about creation persists.

Genesis 1:9 implies that the original earth might have had one landmass. If you look at the continents and islands on the globe, you can see how all the land could fit back together like pieces in a puzzle. The geologic evidence is consistent with the biblical perspective of a single landmass violently ripped apart by a cataclysmic global flood.

Another odd misconception about creation is that massive shift in the entire planet’s topography is even remotely plausible. The beginning of the quote sounds like Dr. Sneed was on to something, only to ruin that perception in the final sentence.

I’m feeling dangerous today, so I’m gonna post a related meme:

Meme Minimizer Ray activated!

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