The Burning Bush Reversed: the Unbiblical Miracles of Young Earth Creationism

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As a Christian, I’d like to appeal to Young Earth Creationists to consider the theological problems their position creates.

I think most YECs are motivated by a desire to believe what the Bible teaches and uphold God’s goodness - a desire I commend and share.
But I think the YEC interpretation of Genesis requires the insertion of unbiblical miracles - that is, not just ones the Bible says nothing about, but ones which are contrary to God’s character and his purposes in the miracles that we know about.

This post is prompted by a recent article on The Natural Historian, Divine Intervention in Geology: How the “Heat Problem” is Reshaping Creationist Theory, in which a prominent YEC appeals to miracle to shore up his theory.

A significant portion of the video focuses on a recent interview with John Baumgardner, the creator of the YEC Catastrophic Plate Tectonics model, a prominent flood geology theory. Baumgardner admits that cooling oceanic slabs from near melting point to their current temperatures within the biblical timeframe is “simply impossible.” He acknowledges that his model requires divine intervention, marking a shift from purely naturalistic explanations to the inclusion of miraculous events.

Baumgardner also discusses the necessity of miraculous intervention in explaining accelerated nuclear decay, which is required to account for the apparent age of rocks in a young Earth framework. This admission is presented as a significant departure from previous attempts by YECs to explain these phenomena through natural processes alone.

I’ll focus here on nuclear decay.
I’m not a scientist, but I’ve done a fair amount of reading on this; maybe others will correct me if I make mistakes.

Nuclear decay is a bit like fire.
When something burns, there is a chemical change in its substance (atoms forming different molecules) which releases energy.
The change and the release go together; you can’t get heat out of wood without turning it to ash, and you can’t turn it to ash without releasing heat.

Similarly, in nuclear decay, there is a nuclear change in its substance (atoms changing into different elements) which releases energy.
The change and the release go together; you can’t get energy out of uranium without turning it to lead, and you can’t turn it to lead without releasing energy.

I’m leaving out a lot of details: the exact isotopes involved, the various steps between uranium and lead, the many different radioactive isotopes and the types of radiation they emit as they decay, etc.
None of that affects the big picture that the change and the release of energy are inextricably linked.

Here’s the problem for YEC.
YECs agree that millions of years worth of nuclear decay (at today’s rates) has occurred in Earth’s history.
Spread out over vast time periods, as mainstream science says, the heat generated by nuclear decay is helpful to Earth’s geology and supports life.

But if YEC is true, that decay must have been miraculously accelerated, releasing all that energy in a much shorter time.
That would make the Earth hotter than the surface of the sun.
Hence Baumgardner’s appeal to a miracle to remove the heat.

It’s true that no natural mechanism could come close to removing the heat, as the linked video discusses.
It’s also true that no natural mechanism could accelerate the decay; its rate is determined by those “fine tuned” universal constants which, if they differed at all, would destroy the universe as we know it.
So if the decay was sped up, both the acceleration and the cooling would have to be miraculous.

But the theological problem is that both the accelerated decay and the removal of heat would be miracles very much unlike anything in Scripture.

Biblical miracles are all about God showing His power and goodness to people.
In John, Jesus’ miracles are called “signs”; he multiplied bread to show that he is the bread of life, raised the dead to show that he is the resurrection, and so on.
In Exodus, God showed his rescuing power to Egypt and Israel via the plagues.
In Genesis, the flood was a demonstration of God’s justice.
All biblical miracles, with the exception of creation, had human witnesses because their seeing was the point.
And even creation sets the stage for this kind of display.

Yet the miracle proposed here by Baumgardner would not show God’s glory.
It would be, at best, invisible to people.
But I think it would actually be the opposite of the burning bush in which God appeared to Moses.

The burning bush was a demonstration of God’s glory because it burned (emitted energy) but was not consumed.
It revealed in that moment the truth that God is both immanent (with us) and transcendent (not part of His creation or bound by it).

In accelerated decay as proposed, the atoms would be consumed (change), but not burn (emit energy).
It would have no witnesses at the time, but later observers would naturally misinterpret it (according to YECs) as evidence of an old earth.

It’s as if, when nobody was looking, God instantly turned a bush into cold ash.

I can imagine God accelerating a fire in order to destroy something.
Or I can imagine him directly creating ash to be used for some purpose.
But an instant conversion from bush to ash without heat or witnesses?
What purpose would such a miracle serve except to make later visitors think that there had been a fire?

Applied to decay, if God wanted lead, why not create lead directly?
Why create zillions of zircon crystals with uranium in them, then change that uranium to lead, making that crystal look like a perfect million-year hourglass, and miraculously remove the generated radiation which would otherwise be the only imaginable purpose for the decay?

What kind of God would do that?
And how would a creation full of such miracles declare his glory?

There’s much more that could be said: how the apparent age shown by decay matches evidence from lake sediments and tree rings and coral and tectonic plate movements and Mars rocks and supernova, how the miracles that make these things look old would need to be multiplied in many places and times both before and after the flood and outside of earth, etc.
Personally, the more I’ve read about the details of how ages are determined, the more convinced I’ve become that the universe appears consistently old.

I can’t accept the idea that God would perform huge numbers of miracles with the goal of making a young universe look old, but I can’t see any other way that a young universe could look the way ours does.

Yes, there are some theological difficulties with old-earth and evolutionary creationism viewpoints.
But I think it should be acknowledged that if YEC has to posit unbiblical miracles - and it actually needs far more of them than Baumgardner appeals to - it has its own theological difficulties.
Namely, unless YECs can show a purpose for those miracles that’s consistent with Scripture, revealing God’s glory rather than concealing the truth, their attempt to uphold the truth of God’s word ends up portraying God as a deceptive creator.
And that conclusion must be intolerable to any Christian.

If more YECs would candidly admit the evidential (and therefore theological) difficulities with their position, I think the debate between YECs and Christians of other persuasions could be a lot more fruitful and a lot more peaceful.

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More so than you might think. Einstein’s E=mc^2 is a general law, and chemistry is not excepted. The products of an exothermic reaction have less mass in principle, although the difference would be too small to measure.

With spontaneous nuclear decay, the products always are less massive. Radioactive decay is the conversion of mass to energy by definition. Heat is not just some sort of byproduct. Cold decay is not a thing.

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Welcome back, @nathanlong. I’ve been overly busy lately and I’m just now getting to your post. Having come from a YEC background, I have great interest in this topic. So I am determined to get back to this thread as soon as I can. For now I will say that I have often said to YEC friends that they are imaging major “recreations” of the universe at least at the time of the fall and during or after Noahic flood.

More later.

When I first realized this as a child, I found that fact amazing. Still do. I remember thinking: “nuclear energy” is everywhere.

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Yes. The gymnastics YECism requires to try and solve their problems are like an endless process of plugging holes in a dike.

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The creationist position here is just another manifestation of the Omphalos Hypothesis.

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Welcome back, @jchapman.

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Thanks @RonSewell - I didn’t realize that, and it’s very interesting!

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In general, I agree with your assessment. We should not be using miracles to plug holes in scientific models.

I would point out though that there are even less plausible examples of plugging holes in theories that are currently accepted solutions by mainstream science, such as inflationary cosmology. If I were to say that God miraculously increased the expansion rate of the universe by many orders of magnitude, and then miraculously stopped this increased expansion rate, all just to plug a big hole in the Big Bang Theory, then according to you that would be out of bounds or “unbiblical” or something. But if we don’t say it’s a miracle. It just happened for no known reason or no known physics, is that suddenly totally acceptable?

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This would appear to be an inaccurate characterisation. An article on the topic was in my Slashdot feed today:

The Hubble tension comes from the fact that scientists can’t agree on the exact rate of expansion of the universe, dictated by the Hubble constant. Basically, the rate can be measured starting from the local (and therefore recent) universe, then going farther back in time — or, it can be calculated starting from the distant (and therefore early) universe, then working your way up. The issue is both methods deliver values that don’t agree with each other. This is where the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) comes in.

Attempting to reconcile conflicting results would hardly appear unscientific. And it would appear that no miracles, explicit or implicit, are being invoked.

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@BenKissling

I would point out though that there are even less plausible examples of plugging holes in theories that are currently accepted solutions by mainstream science, such as inflationary cosmology. If I were to say that God miraculously increased the expansion rate of the universe by many orders of magnitude, and then miraculously stopped this increased expansion rate, all just to plug a big hole in the Big Bang Theory, then according to you that would be out of bounds or “unbiblical” or something. But if we don’t say it’s a miracle. It just happened for no known reason or no known physics, is that suddenly totally acceptable?

I won’t pretend to understand inflationary cosmology and can’t address its plausibility. I do know that the Big Bang theory originated with observations that the universe is expanding, and on that basis, cosmic microwave background radiation was predicted and later found. Those observations at least must be accounted for in any understanding of the history of the universe. If there are untenable gaps in inflationary cosmology, I would hope that scientists would admit this and look for another explanation.

But your question is interesting and makes me think again about my characterization of miracles in the Biblical pattern.
I think I overstated the degree to which miracles must have witnesses.
Although “signs and wonders” are the common Biblical terms for miracles, in principle, I don’t see any reason God wouldn’t perform miracles to somehow “set the stage” for His later revealing of His glory in redemptive history.

My real objection is to the idea of miracles which would obscure the truth.
Consider radioactive decay again.

My understanding is that rock samples are generally dated using multiple radiometric measurements and that agreement is required to confidently state an age.

Among the examples in this article, the St. Severin meteorite, which was observed as it fell to Earth in France in 1966, was dated 6 times by 4 different labs and using 4 different radiometric techniques, each reflecting a different decay process and rate of decay, with all measurements agreeing within error bars to something like 4.4 billion years.

Imagine the intricate miraculous tinkering it would take to speed up the decay in this one meteorite so that all these radiometric ages line up.
The numbers of individual rock crystals, let alone atoms, that would need different laws of physics applied at different times, would be astronomical.
Why would God do all that?
And how could that have any causal connection to the Flood when this meteorite was not on earth at the time?

Or consider the Hawaiian Islands.
According to this article, the age of the islands can be estimated by erosion, the rate at which the plates are have moved, the thickness of its reefs, the fossil sequence present, and the amount of radioactive decay, and all these methods line up.

(There are more examples I’d like to add, but as a new poster, I can only add two links. :grinning:)

It seems like there are three options here: coincidence, conspiracy, or chronology.

  • Coincidence: natural processes and/or divine activity just happened to create this, and many other, perfect appearances of vast age. To borrow an ID concept, this seems about as likely as a pocket watch forming spontaneously.
  • Conspiracy, with two possible sources:
    • God intentionally made a young universe look old. This idea is theologically unacceptable, and YECs would be cutting off the branch they’re sitting on if they endorsed it. After all, YEC is supposed to be based on trusting God’s word, which is trustworthy because God is truthful. The same God who spoke truthfully cannot be supposed to have created deceptively.
    • Scientists have faked all this data in a conspiracy to oppose God. This is implausible for many reasons, including the many scientists who are Christians, the fact that observations span centuries and cultures, the fact that successful conspiracies require small, tight-knit groups (one of the arguments J. Warner Wallace makes that the resurrection of Jesus couldn’t have been a hoax), and the fact that overturning the status quo is the dream of every scientist.
  • Chronology: these things look old because they are old.

It seems that some YECs are committed to a large dose of “coincidence”.
To quote one Answers in Genesis article on the Hawaiian Islands,

“Just as plates accelerated during the Flood and then decelerated, so radioactive decay rates accelerated, apparently in lockstep, and then decelerated… Not only were the tectonic plate motions and volcanic eruptions catastrophic, but even radioactive decay was occurring at catastrophic rates. However, God mercifully ended His judgment by decelerating catastrophic processes, allowing time for the volcanic lavas to build today’s island paradise.”

“Apparently in lockstep” has no explanation in the article.
Aside from all the evidentiary and heat problems here, why would God’s miraculous activity leave behind this kind of apparent agreement of age based on “uniformitarian” assumptions?
Over and over, from islands to meteorites, this kind of “apparent lockstep” occurs.
What theological explanation could account for that result of God’s activities?

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Nathan, you nailed it.

Yes, the Hawaiian Islands have long been my favorite example of consilience in science.

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Thank you @AllenWitmerMiller , I didn’t know the word “consilence” but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the concept.
The Wikipedia article on that word is very helpful.

Another of my favorite examples of consilience is in Flood Geology’s Abominable Mystery.
Joel Duff says that not only is there a progression of plant types as you go up the layers, but the fossilized spores or pollen associated with those plants, whether captured inside or outside varying sized drops of amber, are sorted precisely with their source plants.
That makes absolutely no sense in flood geology and perfect sense on the standard timeline.

Another favorite example is that carbon-14 measurements within layered lake sediments and tree rings can be correlated, showing that the lake sediment layers go back more than 50,000 years - see Testing and Verifying Old Age Evidence: Lake Suigetsu Varves, Tree Rings, and Carbon-14.

One thing I should have said is that I personally know, love, and respect people in the YEC camp.
I also respect and agree with their desire to privilege special revelation over science.
But if the message “THE UNIVERSE IS OLD” were literally written in the stars, I think they’d reconsider their interpretation.
The question for me is: how strong does the evidence have to be?

I’m currently reading a YEC book, “Defending Sin” by Hans Madueme.
Madueme is smarter than I am and clearly well-read, and he understands a lot of the evidence for the standard scientific account.
He argues for his position while acknowledging that the evidence from science currently appears to contradict it.
But (at the risk of oversimplifying) he basically says that he believes the Bible teaches a young earth and that animal death started at the Fall, and that being the case, we just have to believe that and maybe science will come around to it at some point.

For the reasons I gave above, I find that conclusion unsatisfying.
And part of the reason is the nature of Christian faith.

Christianity is a faith that rests on historical claims.
Paul said “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Co 15:17), but only after asserting that “he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1 Co 15:6) - inviting cross-examination.
Many skeptics have become Christians because they investigated the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and found it persuasive; Lee Strobel and J. Warner Wallace are among the examples.

I don’t think that reason alone can make a person a Christian; Scripture says that our minds are darkened by sin and our hard hearts often keep us from seeing the truth we don’t want to see; we need God’s intervention.
But even non-Christians can acknowledge that there is strong historical evidence that Jesus’ disciples believed He had risen, a fact that is pretty hard to explain if He hadn’t.

I like the “Minimal Facts” argument by Gary Habermas, where he lays out historical data that are widely accepted by experts:

The half-dozen facts we usually use are these: 1) that Jesus died by crucifixion; 2) that very soon afterwards, his followers had real experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus; 3) that their lives were transformed as a result, even to the point of being willing to die specifically for their faith in the resurrection message; 4) that these things were taught very early, soon after the crucifixion; 5) that James, Jesus’ unbelieving brother, became a Christian due to his own experience that he thought was the resurrected Christ; and 6) that the Christian persecutor Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) also became a believer after a similar experience.

I think Christianity is unique in having such strong historical evidence that non-Christians can be persuaded to faith, or at least admit that it looks likely even if they decline to believe it.
(Contrast that with the demonstrably false historical claims of Mormonism about the New World.)
I think YECs need to explain why this God would make this so, yet leave such strong apparent evidence against a young earth that Christians would find it impossible to explain.

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Reopening comments since infrequent visitors might need more time.

There is a difference between Observation and Explanation. Cosmic Inflation is observed and very well documented. If you think the explanation is lacking, that’s OK - The last I checked cosmologists are still working to sort it out too. It is typical is science for the observations to lead the explanations, but we also get spectacular examples of the opposite, like the Gibbs boson, Darwin’s Moth, etc…

Anyone arguing with Creationists should start with understanding Omphalos. It applies equally well to ID.

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I don’t know how relevant this is, but some classical theologians like Oderberg and Feser argue not only that God didn’t do something like the Omphalos hypothesis, but that he could not have done so. They claim (relying on the empirical essentialism of the Thomist tradition) that it is an essential property of certain things to grow up, so it would be metaphysically impossible for God to create those things fully formed (instead, they would be something else that looked like those things). Maybe I’m not explaining the argument well, but here’s a passage from Oderberg’s Real Essentialism (p. 173).

Could Socrates have been born old? Could he, that is to say, have been born with the matter of a seventy-year-old man? This, I contend, is metaphysically impossible. Although a physical process is metaphysically necessary for Socrates to change from having blue eyes to green eyes (as eye colour can indeed sometimes change from infancy to adulthood), miraculous intervention or a spontaneous mutation (if such be possible) could have resulted in his acquiring a new eye colour without any intervening physical process. Such an event would not have been a genuine change of eye colour, as opposed to a mere replacement.

By contrast, a physical process is metaphysically necessary for the acquisition of an aged state after having had a youthful state. This is because ageing is part of the very essence of organisms, as decay is part of the essence of all material substances, since they are compound objects subject, as far as we know, to universal laws of energy depletion. Divine intervention might preserve a material substance from decay and hence from ageing, but it would be contrary to its essence that it should enter a state of decay and decomposition without having undergone, in however short a time, the process of ageing itself. Hence I claim that not even God could produce an aged substance that had not gone through a process of ageing. (This counts against the sceptical hypothesis of Bertrand Russell that the universe could have sprung into existence five minutes ago looking exactly like a genuinely old universe (Russell 1921: lecture IX).)

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This would seem to me to assume a very narrow and/or superficial view of the nature of reality.

All of reality involves change, and thus processes of “decay and decomposition” intrinsically linked with growth and recreation. Stars need to ‘decay’ in order to produce the elements (carbon, oxygen, etc, etc) essential for life. To claim that God would forswear all decay is therefore to claim that God would not create anything other than hydrogen.

A God that forswears this would also appear to be a God that values a static perfection over change – a viewpoint not dissimilar to that of the Auditors of Reality in Discworld.

Even in Oderberg’s own examples, it is difficult to see why God would forswear the ‘decay’ of aging, but not the ‘decay’ of an eye-colour-mutation. The difference would appear to be simply one of scale.

It also strikes me as profoundly arrogant for Oderberg to proclaim that he understands God sufficiently to proclaim this to be “contrary to [divine intervention’s] essence”.

In the example of Socrates, it would also seem to imply that God would prioritise the decay of Socrates’ body, over the growth of Socrates’ mind – which is strange, given that Socrates is remembered for the product of his extraordinary mind, rather than any physical perfection.

It is hard to see the ‘metaphysical impossibility’ of any of this.

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I don’t really agree with Oderberg’s argument, since I think that even from an Aristotelian-Thomist perspective it is a non sequitur. As he discusses elsewhere, a substance’s essential properties merely flow from its essence and do not constitute its essence, and can be masked. (He defends the doctrine of transubstantiation along these lines.) Thus, it seems to be metaphysically possible, even assuming Oderberg’s overall framework, for God to create a substance that appears artificially aged.

However, I think you’ve misunderstood his argument in a couple of ways.

All of reality involves change, and thus processes of “decay and decomposition” intrinsically linked with growth and recreation.

Oderberg would certainly not deny that reality involves change. This is the entire basis for the Aristotelian framework of act and potency which underlies his metaphysics. His argument here stems from a different consideration, the one he mentioned in the passage about decay being part of the essence of material substances. (But like I said I still think that’s a non sequitur.)

It also strikes me as profoundly arrogant for Oderberg to proclaim that he understands God sufficiently to proclaim this to be “contrary to [divine intervention’s] essence”.

That’s not what he’s saying. In the Aristotelian framework, “essence” is something that belongs to substances, not events like divine intervention. He’s saying that it would be “contrary to [the material substance’s] essence”.

Anyway, like I said before, I don’t think his argument succeeds as a demonstration of the metaphysical impossibility of the Omphalos hypothesis, even given his metaphysical framework. I just posted it here because it was related to the topic, and I just read his book, and I thought it might provoke some more interaction in this otherwise dead conversation.

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The more pressing concern is that the Omphalos hypothesis would render all empirical investigation useless, since we could never know if what we’re seeing was just created the way it is. Like some other self-defeating propositions, it leaves us with no way to investigate the outside world (or even philosophical views like the Omphalos hypothesis itself – maybe God just created your cognitive state of believing Omphalos, even if you think you have good reasons for it). It’s Descartes’ evil demon all over again.

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Seriously, just before reading your comment, I had read this eye-catching article at the Christian Post:

Now, I suppose it is possible that Tucker was attacked by Descartes’ evil demon. (After all, Descartes no longer has much use for demons.) On the other, I find it UNLIKELY that a demon would attack Tucker Carlson. Why? There’s a thing called professional courtesy.

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Maybe the demons thought he was letting the side down. Demons may be evil, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily dishonest.