Unfortunately, if Kurt Wise is making that claim, he is just plain wrong. There are plenty of other dating methods which can be used to confirm the validity of radiometric dating. Perhaps he has some cogent argument for rejecting those other methods. If so, he should publish them in a peer-reviewed scientific journal so that we can all benefit from his insights.
How do you know this? Moreover, the Bible never makes that claim. Why do you think that the truths which God has revealed in his Creation would be unreliable in telling us anything about the age of the universe?
And if our science is âineptâ, is our theology also âineptâ? If not, why would the study of Godâs creation be inept and fruitless while the study of Godâs Bible would be âeptâ (!) and fruitful? Did God fail by giving us a creation that canât tell us the truth about what happened in the past?
Excuse? Do you mean the enormously massive evidence for many millions of years? Are you telling us that the world which God created is riddled with deceptive evidence of what happened in the past? Or do you believe that we should simply ignore what God has revealed in his creation?
I trust all that God has revealed, both in the scriptures and in his creation. I donât agree with your picking and choosing which of Godâs truths you are willing to examine.
Sure, but if thatâs a modus operandi, you will never be able to discover if, in fact, scripture is wrong. If you allow yourself to simply rationalize, every time you find some sort of contradiction, that maybe youâve just misunderstood/misread/misinterpreted scripture, then when does that ever end?
Also, isnât this idea that you can just keep misreading scripture a piece of evidence that scripture probably isnât from God?
I have this suuuuuper weird idea that an omnipotent, omniscient hyperintellect who is literally supposed to have created us and can read our very thoughts would know how to communicate clearly. I took the hint and stopped rationalizing. I know, Iâm odd in this way.
Iâm not saying this in general. Iâm saying in particular about the interpretation you hold. Have you really ruled out the interpretations that do make sense with science that many of us hold?
Yes, because any interpretation doesnât make sense, is irrelevant to todayâs world, is unnecessary to understanding todayâs world, and is not required to living a good, happy, meaningful, purposeful life.
That is not my point. I believe it is wrong to falsify science to fit a theological mold. What does this suggest? That science has value in and of itself that should not be tricked to fit theology. That is the bone that some have to pick w some creationist organizations (and for proponents of evolutionism i might add) Science will NEVER come into agreement that a corpse smelling of rot can be brought back to life. Science can NEVER explain mass energy being created and can never explain it being eternal (it can try) Science is dumfounded that a Sea can be parted to allow some through safely while it consumes their evil slavemasters.
So my Christian worldview says science has value, but in a universe consisting of mass energy that is created from nothing, is not an ultimate determinor of all truth. When science is that, thats what i call a religion. If a creationist organization seems to want to falsify science to fit a mold, they are buying into sciencism. I see some of this from time to time, but i believe most good creationist organizations are mostly upright and i have been highly blessed by their work.
Would the same peer reviewed scientific journal agree that it is imposible for a corpse that has been rotting for 3 days be capable of gaining life?
I believe that the Christian worldview has at its pinnacle the God who created everything and is is worthy of our adoration. And He is depicted as a powerful, transcendent and involved God in Scripture. The miracle of all miracles is God creating the universe by Him speaking. To me the second is like it, God creating plants and animals by speaking them into existence in a short amount of time ( a couple of days as the idea of day had to be reconfirmed and legitimzed as a day by the semantic âthere was morning and eveningâŚâ
And you are telling me that your belief is that mainly the natural forces in time that lessens the value of God as the creator of kinds by definition of the terms in exchange for placing nature as the pinnacle is fitting to the Christian worldview? I can already hear you saying, âWell God made nature.â By my and many others estimates, it is quite unreasonable to even believe that nature can pull off a trick that caused the uprising of humans like us who can think about God and creation and build technology capable of communication systems we are engaging to speak what we are thinking. If you want to stay on that side, thats none of my business although i care for you. What should be the business of everyone in churches is to hold such views to the light of what defines us as followers of God to see if fitting and i dont see it fitting of Scripture or logicâŚthere is no excuse for a Christian to go there and call it of God
God works for six 24 hours periods of proclamation, each followed by long parenthetical episodes of the unfolding of his commands. In Exodus he hands off our 6 day work week to us based on his truthful account that he only labored for 6 earth days to create everything.
Life in this view is young - basically anywhere from 6000 to a few hundred thousand years old. No biological evolution is needed. Why? Well, even though the earth may be billions of years old, you must remember that we really never date fossils based on the actual sedimentary rock in which they are found. We always date them based on igneous material from deep within the mantle. This view holds that all lava flows during the Flood were contaminated and that it is impossible to obtain a sample that does not contain contaminants. Therefore, even though lava flows near fossils can be young, we will always erroneously date them based on the contaminants they contain, which of course can be millions of years old.
Hence, soft tissue finds in innumerable fossils worldwide presumed to be millions of years old are easily explained in a young life view - with no evolution necessary.
Oh, and the Genesis text remains pure throughout this view, by the way.
@Greg, when God spoke in Genesis 1, did air molecules vibrate so as to propagate sound waves? And did God literally speak, that is, employ the same kinds of phonemes and morphemes found in human speech? Was this literal speech involving vocal cords?
What do you mean by âcontaminantsâ? How could these contaminants result in dates consistent with stratigraphy? How could they result in consistent isochron dates? How could this notion result in any sort of coherent biotic succession? That makes zero sense.
Also, can you tell us which sediments were deposited before the flood, during the flood, and after the flood?
Finally, given all the contamination, how can you possible know that the earth is old? Whatâ the evidence for that?
Of course, every journal would agree that it is impossible for a dead man to come back to life after three days. And it should. The Jews themselves agreed with this. The Christians today agree with this. This is why âthree daysâ was significant. People donât wake up after three days dead unless a miracle has taken place. This kind of miracle is an exception to the rule. It does not mean that the rules donât exist, God created an ordered universe, not a chaotic one. It does not mean that their conclusions are wrong.
Donât you see what you do? You take the exceptions and make them the rules⌠every time. You define reality by the exceptions, such that you have no ability to see reality, itself. It is maddening to read what you write because you donât even seem to read and process what you say. It is not that you are right and everyone else here is wrong. It is that you sit so far to one end of the spectrum that you canât even see to the middle.
Having a conversation with you is so unprofitable because you simply refuse to operate in the same realm as the rest of us. It is so unfortunate because there is much to learn about Godâs amazing creation, but your mind is so closed that you canât see or hear any of it.
@r_speir let me set aside the science. Can I propose a few theological reconciliations that would keep Genesis âpureâ? I want to list out three or four and here which one is least objectionable. How does that sound?
I dont look at this whole discussion as a theological contest that is set to achieve the rightness and wrongness of positions based on evidence. Earlier in this thread, i stated this as accurately as i knew how. I am NOT interested to win you over to a young earth theology for informations sake. Please read my previous statements and see this. PLEASE.
This is not a contest of whose right and whose wrong. Rather, as agreeable to Scripture every man is a liar and only God is True. Ultimately only God is 100% right and we tend to screw things up in our actions, attitudes and accessments. So as a Christian saved from my lie filled sinfulness take a position of reverence to God at His Word that is of an essence that should overwhelm my sense of things. And judging by language in Psalms and Proverbs of a God who so far transcends us in the entirty of His being, i believe this Christian worldview to be quite fitting.
I hear where you are coming from. This is a very difficult conversation that will digress when our underlying perspectives are different that help us towards complete misunderstanding each other. The passage of Scripture that i find fitting to the accusations going to and fro is from Jesus on the sermon on the mount about judging things. In these few verses, Jesus says that we are quite incapable of judging the heart of men and for that matter judging how God functions because of the frailty and unreliability of the measuring stick we use to make such accessments that may be too lofty for us to make. An example would be of a man who displays all the characteristics and fruits that seem to becomming of a true Christian on his exterior. I do not carry a measuring stick capable of determining if this person is truly a child of the living God. I admit i am totally, completely and absolutely incapable. And when it comes to the ways of God, i am even more incapable. You say that miracles like the resurrection of a decaying man occur irregularly but God created an ordered universe. But this gives you absolutely not a single hair fiber of authority to declare the ranges of Godâs creative purposes where He chose to interject miraculous intentions into the fabric of this universe in not only formation but also in its care. Think about that.
I am not interested to win a theological argument. That reeks of gnosticism. I have chosen to follow a real God who is so great and so transcends my feeble mind and being that the only way that i could find reconciliation to Him is via His action and love and forgiveness towards me. So when i read Scripture and some things are dont seem to jive in my human mind, i think, i was never really given the measuring stick to be even capable of declaring with any level of certainty if it is off kilter, so i will stick with what it seems to say from a God who is, by His very nature, beyond human rationale.
If you are bent towards a view that science is a resource that is best to determine truth because you KNOW that God created it and seeded the earth with bacteria that evolved into complex life, then He sits back and watches nature do its thing, then you may never be able to relate to meâŚEVER. You will sneer, confront accuse and maybe slander. You may care less about whether your view or mine is more fitting of the worldview endorsed by Scripture. I care much.
God is right and we can be wrong. But you never assert that you are wrong. Only that you are right, because you are on Godâs side and we are not. This is painfully and patently false. You get humble when you are called on the carpet, and then you go back to insisting that everyone else is wrong, deluded, prideful, arrogant, etc. All that without a shred of evidence. Believe what you want to believe in terms of your own Christian worldview. Most of us could care less. But donât presume to speak for Christianity, the Bible and God Himself in place of the rest of us. The evidence speaks volumes against your position and the near-entirety of Christian scholarship agree that an old earth position is entirely compatible with the Bible.
What reeks of Gnosticism is the âsecret knowledgeâ that you have that none of the rest of us are bright enough to see. YEC has always been like Gnosticism in that its adherents alone possess the way to the truth, and none of the so-called experts can even see it. Thereâs a pride factor there that emboldens non-experts like you to challenge experts that know volumes more than you know, despite their patient responses to your unfounded claims.
This is exactly what you do. Everyone sees you doing this over, and over and over⌠All the while ignoring the fact that the scriptures allow for much more latitude than you allow for.
The arrogant implication is that I do not. Who are you to judge me? You know nothing about me. I love the Lord, I love the Word. I love those who have no appreciation for the Lord nor His Word, and it bothers me to no end that you cast both (God and the Word) in a light that is unpalatable and inconceivable for the unbelievers to accept. You and I both will stand before our Creator one day and account for the words we have spoken. BibleGateway - Keyword Search: stumbling block
This is an excellent question. Thereâs even a recently opened thread here on how important it is to understand context in the case of Charles Darwin. We ought to be able to apply the same reasoning to more ancient texts that we apply to more recent texts. It does bring a smile to my face to think that atheists read the bible like a YECist.
Exactly. But if we apply that reasoning we get the YEC interpretation. Itâs only by interpreting Genesis in the light of more recent science that we find what most here would consider the âtrueâ meaning.
The modern, YEC assumption that Genesis reveals scientific facts and each seemingly relevant scientific discovery has to be read back into Genesis, to me seems like a great weakness. The Bible is always having to catch up to the latest YEC interpretation of science.
I donât quite understand why we canât let ancient Israelite cosmology be what it is (or was) without having to inject modern ideas into it, or without assuming that scientific facts are encoded in the text if only we read it rightly. That doesnât make the Bible âmythicalâ or full of errors. I think cosmology, whether ancient or modern, isnât the main point of Genesis anyway.