How can young-earth creationism maintain such traction?

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The clocks that God has engineered into creation validate each other:

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Nobody has claimed otherwise. You are back in red herring territory again.

And that is a concept included in the doctrine of divine transcendence. It has absolutely ZERO relevance to addressing your confusion over philosophical materialism versus the methodological materialism of modern science.

. . . it fully is in harmony to what any good evolutionary biologist will tell you: orderly taxonomies can be applied to animals because male-female pairs produce offspring which are always of the same type of organism as their parents. Animals procreate according to their own “kind”. If ever a scientist found an example of an animal pair NOT bringing forth offspring according to its own type of organism, that would be evidence which would create skepticism about the theory of evolution.

If you were more familiar with the Bible, you would know that God is sovereign over all chance/randomness, as in:

The lot is cast in the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. — Proverbs 16:33 (NIV)

Once again you assume a conflict which the Bible denies. God is not surprised by any “chance” event nor randomness and the fact that the universe scientists investigate is filled with random processes negates God’s sovereignty not in the least. Once again, you need to grasp the idea of a much bigger and more powerful creator than the one your traditions have relegated to you.

I fully agree that God created “according to kinds.” Indeed, through evolutionary processes, he still is!

Rubbish. I have a comparative religions training in my background. You have resorted to a vacuous claim in desperation. You appear clueless about east Asian religions.

There is nothing honoring to Christ about your insistence that God’s revelations in his creation cannot be trusted to tell us the truth about the past.

Red herring alert.

The Bible claims otherwise.

Your words are once again incoherent. Jesus Christ sacrificed himself on the cross to save sinful humans because of his love for those who were created in the divine image. You need to actually read Genesis and not just pontificate about it.

Nobody on this thread has tried to “water down the cross.” You are back to trolling for red herrings while you are already reeking from the dead fish in your pocket. (Thanks, @Michael_Callen!)

Not on this thread because it is irrelevant to “How can Young Earth Creationism maintain such traction.” However, if you are genuinely unclear about soteriological concepts, you can pursue that topic on another thread and I will explain the Gospel to you.

Greg, if you understood the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you would know that nobody brings anything with them that somehow gives them the “right” to enter his kingdom. I suggest that you ponder this scripture:

Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — John 1:12 (NIV)

The right to enter the kingdom is given by Christ, and is not due to anything which humans bring along with them as some sort of legacy or achievement of their works on earth.

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Okay… So, why do you expect God to tell you that our dating methods were off when he gave us a planet with laws that do not?

EDIT: Please recall that in response to you mentioning it, you have been asked for the following. This is not an unimportant issue, as you know. Please advise:

Please, let us know what is the most important tenet of all Scripture.

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There are a number of signs that your dating methods are off. I showed an article about the recent surprise encounter w a living shark species thought to be extinct and found in a fossil layer purported to be 200 myo. For a shark species to carry a similar anatomy for that long is very odd and scientists who hold to an old earth know it even as they spin. Then you have the virginia opposum and ginko tree etc. Living fossils. Of course matter comprising of detectable dna substances found in dino fossils is troubling. And things like volcanic rock of recent age dating thousands of years etc. When i as a yec who observe the Bible about what it says in early Genesis encounter such head scratchers for mainstream evolution crowd, these to me prove God to be true and i trust that He is.

The most important tenet…hmm…so obviously the gospel of Jesus dying for our sins is important and central. But what is sin and why did it take God to act to forgive us? Then we must ask who is God and what is His nature that requires propitiation thru Christ? Then we must ask ourselves when we have supposedly placed our faith in Christ for salvation, how can we know it is true? Should we find wisdom in examining ones life to see if it “passes the test” of being truly right and forgiven in Gods sight? And what is the test? And is it apt to have a holy reverence towards God after conversion or is He just like a buddy of ones imagination? And can one live a life of unrepentant sexual immorality and still find acceptance by God thru Jesus? And is one of the fruits expected from conversion acts of what could be refered to the “kingdom now theology” where the church is mandated to take dominion over cultural pockets when Scripture reserves this for Jesus in His second coming? And is a fruit of salvation a tendency to redefine God who says He is Creator of kinds which was accomplished in quick sequence but is really instead one who sat back and watched chance and nature do its thing over ages?

So the most important tenet? For starters, i think we could start with Romans. And im not talking just the “Romans Road” im talking the whole letter. The whole letter gives a gospel perspective which gears the heart towards God as Creator, reveals His character, defines sin, grace, forgiveness, examination, wrath, the Holy Spirit, fruits that indicate salvation and bad fruit that does not etc… and in the first chapter of Ro vs 19 says, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.”

So, lets just think about the reality of dying and going to the judgement seat of Christ. You are standing before God and God asks you with a mighty thunderous piercing voice: "Who did you say that I Am? And you reply, “King of kings and Lord of lords.” The He asks, “who is man and how do you say that I brought him to be and exist?” Do you think it appropriate to then explain to God how mainstream materialistic science points out to us that we actually were not created directly, but instead evolved via survival of the fitest evolution from lower animals etc? And remember, the Almighty Maker of the universe is towering over you and provided grace by sending Himself to save us from sin so that we could joyfully represent Him well. What is the appropriate answer towards God who gave us promises in His word that cannot be broken and sent prophets to speak on His behalf? What is the appropriate answer by someone saved by grace through faith so that there is no room for human boasting? You can fool me and i can fool you. But nobody fools God. For a purported Christian to cling to a godless materialistic evolutionary perspective makes no sense. Sin is running contrary to God. Evolutionism is contrary to an extreme. The gospel unto salvation by grace through faith in Christ plus nothing brings salvation. As the Spirit indwells a true believer, fruit of abiding in Him at His word is the test that must be passed for salvation to be proved true.

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And I showed you an article where

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Greg… For goodness sakes… I asked you two questions and you answered neither of them.

  1. Why would you expect God to tell you in heaven that our dating methods were wrong when he gave us a planet with laws in which they are not… they literally work and are correlated multiple directions independently?

To this you responded with reasons why you don’t accept radiometric dating and completely ignored the question. Please answer it.

  1. What is the most important tenet of scripture to which you referred earlier in this post?

To this you replied, the entire book of Romans.

Do you not see the irony of being one who values words so much, and is so literal, that he cannot see past the universe not being created in six 24-hour days, but then is so willy-nilly with words that the entire book of Romans is “the most important tenet of scripture.”

A tenet is tenet is an opinion, belief, or principle held to be true by someone or an organization. Clearly the “book of Romans” is not an opinion, belief or principle… It is an entire letter with dozens, if not hundreds of them… What is the most important tenet of all scripture??? You referred to it above in private discussions with @AllenWitmerMiller.

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Advance apologies if this is off-topic but I’m curious. What exactly is it you see as a problem for atheists? I can only speak for myself but I never had anything that needed replacing. Sure, we are social animals and, where support within the community is largely dependent on religious affiliation and there is a lack of secular institutions this may be an issue but this is, from a European perspective, largely a US problem.

Actually, I see I am on-topic, as the answer to the thread topic is social pressure! :slight_smile:

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  1. Because there are legitimate seeds of fact that arouse doubt that the universe is old. You are so busy decrying yec ministries “false” that you wont acknowledge their research that reveals concerning nuggets that throw a wrench into the old earth paradigm.
  2. Because of the verse, "There is a way that SEEMS right to man, but in the end it leads to death.
  3. Because a holy reverence towards God at His word is a natural byproduct of salvation. And a lessening fear of man and including what the mainstream flow in scientific circles tells us should also be a biproduct.
  4. In Dt, there is at least one example of God allowing circumstances that provide a test to see how trusting one is of God at His Word.
  5. Because God can create wine instantly from water that when viewed by science in multiple independent directions that same day undoubtedly reveals the substance to have old age when it was actually very young.
  6. Because historical science… as produced by puny people who exist on a sand particle of all knowledge next to a all the knowledge base of God which can be described by all the particles on a beach comparitively… should be considered frail next to Gods testimony.

The most important tenet is God who stands alone within a triune personhood who describes himself best to us as “I AM.” He is mysterious, yet we can have a relationship with Him. His ways are not our ways. He is outside of time and we are inside of it. He controls everything and we control nothing with any ultimacy.

When it comes to honing in on a single tenet for us to acknowledge that arouses the best chance that we find true relationship with Him, then the single tenet i would stand on is for the preacher to preach the full counsel of Scripture in the context of itself. This ultimately finds at the pinnacle of its counsel the cross. But for salvation to be more likely, one hearing from a preacher who is communicating Gods words from Genesis to Revelation is best.

I think that you want me to say, “well Jesus is the most important tenet.” Well He is quite important as He was in the garden of Eden, with the prophet Daniel and prominent in new covenant times of course. They say,“Just give me Jesus.” And it was through Jesus that all things were created by Him speaking them into existence as He was outside and not embodying the natural realm.

For this, evolutionism and mainstream should be traded in for creationism and the narrow road outside of mainstream provided by God.

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That’s an assertion without supporting evidence.

No. “YEC ministries” don’t do any scientific research. They merely make claims. Indeed, the few Ph.D. scientists who work for such ministries do a lot of speaking engagements but they don’t do actual scientific research. Some YEC ministries have huge income and budgets but they don’t invest in laboratories or peer-reviewed scholarship. (Several such scientists have left said ministries out of frustration over the refusal of the organizations to fund their scientific research. They found themselves doing nothing but speaking engagements and writing anti-science articles which can attract donor support.)

I was once very invested in the Young Earth Creationist world of “creation science.” It was my study of the Bible itself that led me to reexamine my ardent beliefs in YECism. Some years later I started looking at the actual evidence in the universe itself and I realized that the world is many billions of years old. God does not lie nor does he create a universe filled with deceptive evidence.

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The RATE study had how many PhDs in attendance? You may disagree w them but they still choose to perform honest science on one hand while honing in on Scriptural integrity w the other.

Deception according to God is looking into Gods perfect Word as into a mirror that exposes who we are then going away and forgetting what we see.

You are right-God does not lie. But He tests us. Military strategy would logically arouse Gideon to build a bigger army in order to defeat the Midianites. God had other plans. Was God deceptive when He promoted ideas contrary to miltary research of that day? Had Gideon chosen his manmade strategy, he would have most likely been defeated.

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The RATE Project arbitrarily with zero supporting evidence claimed that during creation week and the Noahic flood all nuclear decay rates were accelerated by a factor of one billion. Nothing in their self-published “research” supported that conclusion. That’s not scientific research. That’s merely an assertion to support the young earth position of their donors.

The RATE Project was long ago (late 1990’s to early 2000’s, if I recall) and was the only time a YEC-ministry provided somewhat significant funds for a group of PhD scientists. (The Creation Research Society put up a quarter million dollars and additional private donors contributed another million.) The RATE Project broke no new ground and simply tried to poke holes in the piles of peer-reviewed scholarship supporting an old earth conclusion. (They conducted no new original research. And none of those PhDs were specialists in the scientific disciplines they were trying to defy. That’s why their self-published conclusions were univerally panned by scientists in such fields. Christians included.)

Playing games by simply asserting without evidence that something accelerated nuclear decay rates twice in the past is not science. Indeed, if nuclear decay rates had actually accelerated by a factor of one billion for the first two days of creation week as they claimed, the earth’s water would have boiled off into space and the planet would be lifeless. To that you will claim that God did such a “miracle” (though neither God’s creation nor God’s word provide evidence for that!)—but arbitrarily fabricating miracles takes one out of the scientific realm entirely. Arbitrary claims are not science. A miracle by definition is a situation where there is no natural explanation involving the material processes which science investigates!

Irrelevant tangent. The story of Gideon has absolutely nothing to do with this topic.

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Nothing could be further from the truth. The crocodile’s body plan is very similar to a Dimetrodon’s body plan, sail aside. Convergent evolution produces similar body plans under parallel selection pressure all the time, and even creationists must acknowledge this, given the panda’s thumb. If a particular body plan works well and there is no selection pressure to change it, it will not change.

Is “matter comprising of detectable dna substances” your way of saying that you don’t know what it is but you want it to sound important?

I hate to make this so adversarial, but really: have you ever stopped to wonder why none of your arguments actually sound very good, even to you? I wondered, too, in my former life. I told myself it was because creationists just didn’t have enough resources to study sufficiently. But I was wrong. The arguments sounded dumb because…well, they were.

If you try to use an unmarked yardstick to measure the width of a hair, you’re going to get a nonsense answer.

If creationism want to show that radiochronology is bunk, they need to show why it gives such predictable results 99.99% of the time. I tried. I couldn’t.

The problem with your statement is that its inverse looks pretty bad. If “evolutionary head-scratchers” prove God to be true, then would the lack of them prove God to be a liar? I hope not.

Funny how this bit was never mentioned by Jesus.

The part that Jesus did mention?

“If you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.”

That’s the part that matters.

I concur. Do atheists need a basis for their morality other than the Bible? Yes, they do. However, I’ve never met one (other than exvangelicals) who had any trouble finding one that worked well.

Nuggets never negated Newton. If you want to overturn a branch of science, like Einstein did to Newton, you’ve gotta do the work. Science is really, really good at chewing up wrenches and spitting out the pieces.

Honest science starts with the evidence and reasons toward conclusions, not the other way around.

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But they concluded honestly. They are going to continue the program when funds are available.

Trying to Marry the natural and the supernatural is an impossible task. Creation alone is wholly unscientific because according to natural laws,matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Yet at the same time, mass energy is running down. So it seems that we have a conundrum- signs of supernatural and natural. I have many questions. Historical science tries to answer these. But our science is via the perceptions of man and man has a very poor track record, so in the meantime, i think the wise path is to trust God who beyond sciences capability rather than trust what mans science seems to conclude.

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Irrelevant. Evidence is what matters. Simply making arbitrary assertions—with no supporting evidence—is not science.

So you prefer to trust man’s ideas about a young earth rather than what God has clearly revealed in his creation. (God created the basis for science, not man. It is not “man’s science.”)

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No argument with the data and the science at hand. It is when you use it to jump to unwarranted conclusions – like “gradualism over eons of time has been demonstrated”, or “common descent occurred” – that you have defied the boundaries of science. This is why YECs and other varieties of Creationists who repudiate evolution hold their ground. Your conclusions do not follow from the data.

It is interesting here that you actually deflect and decide not to deal head-on with the problem of soft tissue in fossils. No honest paleontologist, not even Mary Schweitzer, would claim the problem for evolution has been resolved.

What you label a “US problem” is actually an admirable quality. Americans from their founding have been free-thinkers. YECs included. Creationists who defy evolution do so for very good reasons – the top reason being that evolutionist have fallen short of proving their hypothesis of gradualism and UCA. Europeans could use a little more free-thinking if you ask me.

Science is good so long as it remains within credible boundaries. Time and again, evolutions have demonstrated that they leap to unwarranted conclusions with the data.

No, honest science starts with the evidence and reasons toward careful and warranted conclusions based on the data at hand.

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Even if the planet is old, Darwinian gradualism does not follow. Evolution would definitely require an old planet, but an old planet does not concede evolution.

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Greg, sincerely, thank you for directly answering my two questions above. I appreciate you doing so and enjoyed reading direct responses from you.

They did not conclude honestly. They concluded from the front, a priori. This is not science, it is propaganda, but, as Allen described, they did honestly conclude that what they are postulating would result in temperatures over 20,000 degrees, resulting in the water boiling off the planet and life being lost.

God created the natural and it operates under fixed laws from which deductions can be made. It is good to have many questions. There’s nothing wrong with that… the problem occurs when you simultaneously have all of the answers to those same many questions. You are right to see that see that the subject is complex, but you are wrong to say that answers cannot be deduced, and that the creation cannot be understood. It was created in a way in which systems are in place and things operate in a predictable manner.

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You have neither read the report nor paid any attention to the numerous devastating critiques that have been explained to you.

Carry on. And happy Lord’s day to you and yours.

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You have demonstrated no understanding of the data, so any statements you make about them are not persuasive.

I invited you long ago to provide an analysis of the data that shows you have actually obeyed Proverbs 18:17. So far, you are silent.

But hey, have a good Lord’s day!

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I can agree with this to some degree. We must ask ourselves why must we trust that the body plan had to have been evolved from a bacterium in the first place? Why not created? And 100 million years of the virginia opposum retaining the same anatomy sure seems a stretch, does it not?

You are right! Spot on! You are smart, i can tell. All i know is that i read about how mainstream science was very surprised at this finding and i appreciate this initial surprise but disrespect their concluding spin back to an old earth evolutionary paradigm w no intraspection.

News alert, according to Scripture, salvation by God hanging Himself on a tree to die for our sins not only sounds really dumb to a lost world, but it additionally sounds akin to a “sentence of death.” If science relies on natural and God performed the supernatural that confuses science, then thise who put a lot of stock in science will see evidence from God that proves one suggested supernatural path as a dumb interpretation. The Bible predicts this.

Religion or our prospering in our religious duties to make much of self sounds and feels really smart.

Scripture says to us that God delights in those who trust Him by faith like a child trusts his parent. Many smart people are self promotedly rich on various accounts and Jesus has bad news for those self promoters and rich…its an impossible task for them to find God. Goodnews is that with God, all things are possible

So i guess we all have a fork in the road: develop faith that finds its basis upon the opinions of man, or develop a faith that finds its basis on Scripture even as it contradicts man. I think when i enter heaven, God will not be too upset w me if my interpretations of things were even wrong but yet still a hearty attempt to trust Him at His word. A mainstream evolutionist who is going w the flow of mainstream inteigencia at our universities (which honestly are tending towards foolish thinking in many respects) today before God…God may speak to these sarcastically as He did to Job and his friends: “Were you there when i created the leviathin?” And perhaps,“who are you who that darkens my counsel?”

Funny that this statement is my suggested scenario as if one is before God at His judgement seat. I never said that Jesus gives example of this in Scripture. I do know Scripture however that suggests to us today that ones claim to know God in words is meaningless and impotent and worthless when their lives, actions and resultant testimonies do not match the claim. This from Mt 7:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

So saying God is lord and even performing what appear to be in His service is not enough. Knowing God is what counts. I just have a suspicion that going about in support of mans conclusions while snubbing God who one can know thru His Word and prayer be a red flag. I believe that some, like the thief on the cross get to heaven based on faith in Christ where there was no time to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit as an ambassador for God. But if there is time and no growth, no tendency to proclaim the God described in Scripture but rather one based on the opnions of man should be sending off warning signals.