Well yes, infinitely nuanced, and with Omphalos they must all be true. I think I’m beginning to see why theologians reject Omphalos.
Omphalos is a book, and it is honestly a misnomer. The fact of the matter that things often, maybe even usually, are not as they seem. That is true in science and in theology. Moreover we can construct or even note in scripture several example were God created things with the appearance of a false history. One example is when Jesus turns water to wine, giving it to the party master, who has a false impression of it. No one objects to this because Jesus was not being deceptive.
That’s the crux of it. The real issue to avoid is what is better termed The Deceptive God Objection (DGO).
If we can produce some explanation, other than deception, for the false appearance then theological problem is avoided. Often we can. In the case of the age of the earth, maturity or readiness for use explains many pieces of evidence, but not all. That turn out to be consequential.
The Last Thursday objection also depends on a strawman. The reason people think the earth is young is because they feel a trustworthy witness has told them so. That it, in principle, grounding for such a belief. No purportedly trustworthy witness has indicated the world was created last Thursday. So the epistemology is different.
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Very well, I stand corrected. I will ponder on this when I
m not so sleepy.
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Or you could simply accept their argument, point out that their reasoning is utterly unreliable, and reject their ideas about God, the bible and the world being 6000 years old.
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I would agree, depending on what you mean by “many” and “not all”. I’d say that maturity/readiness explains a very small proportion of the evidence and the great bulk that it doesn’t explain is conclusive. Unless of course God is deceptive. There really are no credible reasons for most things. Yes, you need some kind of soil. But why should that soil contain, for example, well-rounded sand grains or the breakdown products of feldspars, and so on? It would be necessary to create a population including adult animals, but why create the species with a false history of common descent? And are we including flood geology, which exists only to explain away signs of age in the sedimentary record? Etc. Deception seems the only motive, and I don’t think anyone can come up with a plausible alternative.
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Regarding the age of the earth? That sounds about right to me.
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And other features of the Omphalos model too. But if you agree, don’t you also have to agree that Omphalos implies a deceptive God?
There is no “omphalos” model in a generic sense. If you mean in regards to Young Earth Creationism, yes it does seem to imply a deceptive God, but the insistence on a global flood is where it all really seems to fall appart. That evidence against a global flood cannot be explained by even Omphalos.
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I’d say it falls apart long, long before that. What about the evidence for common descent, the age of rocks said to be pre-flood, distant stars and galaxies, missing stable and unstable isotopes, remanent magnetism, deep earthquakes in Benioff zones, etc. ad infinitum?
I’m not sure I can dispute you here.
That is the weakest form of agreement I can recall ever seeing in my life. Sure you don’t want to up the volume just a bit?
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I don’t see how to avoid the DGO with YEC. I do not think current iterations of YEC succeed. Maybe others we do not know of do. It is possible that the hypertime fall does, but I’m not sure.
“Hypertime fall”?
I haven’t read this book though.
But what does it mean?
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