Native Creationists - How has creationism changed? (Wood v. Duff/MacMillan)

That was the blog post that originally freed me up to actually look honestly at the evidence. I was still just as much of a YEC as him at the time but it gave me courage.

Chromosomal fusions are not TERRIBLY different from any other mutation. Typically coding genes remain unscathed and in many cases you still have full reproductive capacity.

Here are some articles you can start with:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/evo.12481

1 Like

This discussion of the chromosome 2 fusion is wandering off topic and I’m not sure how informative it is at this stage.

3 Likes

I would say it ought to be split off but @colewd doesn’t appear to have any intention of paying attention to the discussion.

I agree it could be a fusion sight. What I am saying at this point it is not definitely a fusion site.

@colewd it definitely looks like a fusion site.

Now what?

3 Likes

Yes, it is definitely a fusion site.

1 Like

Time to move all the chromosomal fusionstuff to a new topic?

1 Like

Wood’s point is clearly that all YECs are operating within the same Kuhnian paradigm as Morris and Whitcomb, that paradigm being we believe Gen 1-11 is an accurate history of the world on its own terms and doesn’t need to be egregiously reinterpreted to accommodate modern scientific theories and natural history. Wood is clearly arguing that different views on speciation and the boundaries of the biblical kind are “normal science” in the Kuhnian sense and just working out the details within the YEC paradigm.

I find it odd, for example that @David_MacMillan suggests that flood geology today is basically the same as Morris and Whitcomb while creation science biology is so vastly different. Morris and Whitcomb argued for the vapor canopy theory, which is completely defunct among creation scientists today. Virtually every creation scientist working in geology is working on a plate tectonics model, and I would argue that there’s a real consensus that is mostly completely formed about Baumgardner’s Catastrophic Plate Tectonics model, which has no need of the vapor canopy hypothesis. Tim Clarey’s work, now published in Carved in Stone, is at the forefront of flood geology today.

Yet all of us affirm that we are part of the same movement and appeal to Henry Morris as its founder, despite these vast differences. Both Baumgardner and Clarey published their work through ICR, founded by Morris. So I’m taking Wood’s side here.

I love how critics of YEC seem to focus in on the literal six days view as though that were the most important aspect of the view called “young earth creationism”. Why is it called “young earth creationism”? Well, obviously because the central claim is the earth is young compared to the modern scientific consensus, around 6,000 years old. Surely this is more fundamental to the YEC position than literal 24 hr days.

And in fact, the view that the biblical chronology is accurate does describe Christian scholarship going all the way back to the beginning. There was some debate about whether the days in Genesis 1 were literally 24 hrs or not, but most of that was due to the geocentrism of the early Christians. There was even a very small amount of debate on the earth’s shape, though most educated Christians knew the earth was round. You will find zero, nada, zilcho debate on the age of the earth. EVERYONE affirmed the biblical chronology as historically accurate up until the 18th century. I challenge you to find even a single example of a Christian writer who denied the chronology derived from the Bible of the earth being the equivalent of 6-8,000 years old today. As such, the claim made by YECs today is that we are in fact following in the tradition going all the way back to the beginning of Christianity and even older into Jewish tradition based on the Genesis chronology. Literal six-day creation is a tangential argument with day age theorists and serves no other real function. The age of the earth is the central defining feature of YEC.

I take that view too as! The GAE makes space for precisely this.

1 Like

Your view is an egregious reinterpretation Josh. The genealogies in Gen 5 start with Adam. Adam was created at the beginning of creation. Therefore the earth is ~6,000 years old today.

Your idea is similar to many of the OEC ideas like the gap and day-age theories that attempt to shoehorn large amounts of time into the narrative for scientific, not textual, reasons.

So you say :slight_smile: .

Historical theology doesn’t bear that theory out. That interpretation of Genesis was around long before Darwin.

2 Likes

Excellent Idea!

1 Like

YEC is defined as the belief that the earth is around 6,000 years old based on the Genesis chronology. How old do you think the earth is Josh?

Depends which world or earth we are talking about, doesn’t it? :slight_smile:

Many YECs don’t believe the earth is young, but that life is young. Have you heard of Young Life Creationism? :slight_smile: See @r_speir

Besides, you defined your hermeneutics a different way:

My concern about your interpretation is that it doesn’t take Genesis on its own terms. If you followed you paradigm more closely, an old earth wouldn’t be such a problem for you.

1 Like

I’ve never seen an even minimally coherent explanation of young life, old earth creationism. Have you? If so, could you point me to it?

4 Likes

Well, you won’t be satisfied with it.

From a scientific side, they grant the evidence or an old earth is strong and valid. But they don’t accept the evidence for ancient life, but this isn’t any less coherent than standard YEC.

From a theological point of view, they are YEC through and through (and are accepted by YEC as YEC), but see space in Scripture to allow or an ancient earth. They think, however, that death across the globe only came after Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve were recent.

It does not seem any less coherent than standard YEC. More interestingly, it shows (contra @BenKissling) that the foundational non-negotiables of YEC is not actually the age of the earth, but rather the idea of taking Genesis 1-11 as real history. And that idea isn’t necessarily in conflict with the evidence.

1 Like

I’d say it’s much less coherent. It wasn’t even an explanation. All you did was repeat “old earth, young life” with more words. Perhaps you could direct me to someone else’s coherent explanation.

If I recall, Sal Cordova flirted with this idea. He thought there could be young fossils in old rocks, but he never explained how that was possible. Is that what you mean?

2 Likes

Finally we are back on topic! Thank you, haha.

I understand your point here. Flood geology has definitely gone through some very large changes, whether in rejection of the vapor canopy model or the development of catastrophic plate tectonics. It’s a very fair question: why do I think these changes are essentially quantitative and non-essential, while the changes in the world of creationist biology are qualitative and so essential as to earn the “postcreationist” neologism?

I remember seeing a video of John Whitcomb speaking shortly before his death, at the dedication (or perhaps it was the opening?) of the Ark Encounter. It was amusing because he was going on about the vapor canopy business and of course no one said anything. Even in the world of real science, we sometimes have to let the old guard simply die off before a new paradigm can be fully embraced. That’s just human nature, I suppose.

So why don’t I think this shift is as significant? Well, the vapor canopy is not the fundamental idea of flood geology. The mechanism by which flood geology happens is separate from the underlying concept that fossil layers were deposited by the flood. That is the paradigm set up by Maurice and Whitcomb, and that is the paradigm that has been followed ever since. Advancing a different mechanism for portions of the flood and changing small details surrounding the way in which the flood forms strata is fine because it doesn’t tack against the overall current.

Imagine, however, that someone came along and began acknowledging the evidence for temporal superposition: that layers on top of other layers were clearly and unmistakably younger…and not just by a matter of hours or days. They proposed a “flood geology” in which the flood was responsible for only the tiniest fraction of the geologic column and instead insisted that the vast majority of fossil-bearing strata were post-flood deposits produced over a period of several centuries after the flood. Everything above the lowest Paleozoic layers, they argued, was post-flood deposition. They would reject as flawed virtually all the arguments for rapid deposition championed by flood geologists before them.

This wouldn’t be just a change of mechanism. They could still call this idea flood geology, but by accepting the evidence for superposition and rejecting a flood origin for the vast majority of strata, they would have gone so far from the roots of flood geology that it really would be a new idea altogether. In a sense they would simply be rediscovering the evidence for deep time, even while still trying to shoehorn it into a few thousand years.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about with postcreationism. The acceptance of the evidence for broad common ancestry has gone beyond the original vision of young earth creationism. Arguing that giraffes and sheep could share a common ancestor flies in the face of all creationist biology arguments ever. Same with the idea that cetaceans could have evolved from a terrestrial Ark pair, or the idea that seals and bears share a common ancestor. That’s not your daddy’s creationism at all.

2 Likes

First of all, let me just say I find it incredibly annoying that this is the only forum I’ve ever been on that doesn’t allow me to program my own block quotes. I literally have to copy the entire quot every time and edit out all the stuff I don’t want instead of simply copying it one time and separating quotes out by typing “[/quote]”. So freaking annoying.

Yeah, Kuhn was right about science. Old news. Also old news is that the creation science community is no different from the so-called “real science” community. Paradigm shifts occur and defenders of the old paradigm don’t so much change their minds as die off.

So in other words exactly the sort of debate that in fact does occur over where the post-Flood boundary is.

Who among YECs say that seals and bears share a common ancestor? Giraffes and sheep? And anyway, I don’t think we have the knowledge as of yet to clearly delineate the biblical kinds. Such a research program would have to focus on limits of evolutionary processes, precisely the sort of research disfavored within the evolutionary paradigm.

And anyway none of that matters. The claim you and Duff et al. make in the paper is that “hyper-evolution” gives away the store. That’s simply false. Variation programmed in from the beginning is totally different from variation that is generated by a subsequent mechanism, and programmed variation would be expected to occur faster than not. What would be the purpose of programming in variation from the beginning that occurs no faster than a random search of the sequence space? The claim is that variation occurs faster but has absolute limits. That is completely the opposite of the evolutionary paradigm which claims that variation is slow but has no absolute limits.

No they are not. And I have read comments on PS by @r_speir to that effect.