That is true if the objective is to distinguish actual age from created age. Tree rings would reflect past climate and prevailing wind, stable isotope ratios consistent with the weather, carbon dating the age from pith to bark, bore holes from beetle attacks. But that was Gosse’s point.
I have much more respect for Henry Gosse than is generally accorded. He spends the better part of his book arguing that maturity is not possible without a history, and that nature is of a continuous cycle. He did not so much propose the Omphalos hypothesis as a kludge to fix the appearance of age, as recognize that age is essential in any stage of creation - it is inescapable. He merely did away with the starting point. In that, he displayed far more insight as a naturalist than present day YECs that envision ex niholo platonic ideals, Adam without a navel, trees without rings, and call galaxies mature without any definition. The reason Gosse provoked such a dismissal was that his hypothesis forced a confrontation with the inherent absurdity of shazaam style creation.
How does “decay being part of the essence of material substances” and Oderberg’s claim that:
… mesh with the New Testament miracle of Jesus turning water into wine (i.e. fermented, and thus decayed, grape juice)?
My point is that everything is in a state of decay, from some perspective, so it would seem to be that implying that “divine intervention” would preclude creating something in an already “decayed” state because “it would be contrary to its essence”, would seem to preclude divine intervention from any creative act involving anything beyond the most basic building blocks of the universe. Any looser limitation would appear to be purely arbitrary.
I am not sure whether it is Aristotele himself, Aquinas, or later reinterpretations that I am having a problem with (or even perhaps ‘all of the above’) – but something is rotten in the state of Denmark!
The above description of this “framework” did not exactly engender confidence in it. E.g.:
If this relationship is true, then one can deduce the existence of a being that is purely actual, a being that without any potential or potency. Such a being would be all-powerful, because he could not have the potential to gain any power. This being would be all-knowing, since it could not gain any more knowledge.
Even if the first statement is true (which the description merely assumes rather than demonstrates), the second statement does not necessarily follow. This “being that [is] without any potential or potency” could equally be all-feeble, “because he could not have the potential to” lose any power.
Either case requires an additional assumption for the being to be “without any potential or potency” – that the all-powerful being cannot lose power, and that the all-feeble being cannot gain power.
If either assumption is justifiable, then it would seem that both assumptions are – and so the being without any potential or potency could be of any, arbitrary, power level.
It would seem that this style of argumentation only works if you go into it with the prior understanding that the conclusion will be “God”, and that any other, apparently equally-valid, paths can be ignored.
Fascinating. But while ethanol in booze may be considered a “decay product”, what about the ethanol which is found in all sorts of places in the universe for the past decade or so, such as in:
Perhaps the water-to-wine event was not actually identical to organically-produced wine. Just a mental exercise: if it was “abiotic wine” with just water, ethanol, glycerol, and a few acids, tannins, sugars, and esters in some galactic blend, would it still be evidence of “decay.” Or the opposite?
Occam’s Razor can be helpful in this instance. Tucker Carlson said it was a demon who attacked him—but keep in mind that “Demon” is simply what Carlson used to call his boss, Rupert Murdoch. (After all, haven’t we all noticed that Murdoch sounds an awful lot like Marduk, the Babylonian god of thunderbolts and power, as well as Mushussu the snake-dragon? Sounds pretty demonic to me.)
My original point was that a universe with so many specific apparent histories and evidences of great age makes YEC not only evidentially implausible but theologically difficult to justify.
Contra Oderberg (as far as I understand him), I take it as given that God can do anything He wants to do unless it’s logically impossible or contrary to His character. Eg, God can’t make a square circle because, as C.S. Lewis said, “meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, ‘God can.’” And God can’t commit evil because He is by nature holy.
The Ompholos hypothesis at first glance sounds like a way that YEC could be true. I could believe that an instantaneous creation needed a universe with apparently-old stars to get the right elements and radiation, and trees with growth rings for structural reasons. But take into account all the evidence and you’d be stuck trying to give a reason why there must fossils in the ground and specific quantities of lead trapped in zircon crystals in order for the universe to function. Such things seem to serve no purpose except to give evidence about the past, which is either truthful or not. If not, Omphalos creates a theological problem. The heavens (and the rest of creation) are telling the glory of God, not proclaiming a false history.
But major YEC groups don’t embrace Omphalos fully; it seems like they appeal to “appearance of age” only when they have no other recourse. More typically, they tend to claim (like Answers in Genesis) that the evidence does support YEC, which requires them to ignore or deny mounds of evidence. Others (like Hans Madueme and Todd Wood) more humbly acknowledge that yes, much evidence appears contrary to YEC, but assert that someday, in this life or in eternity, some way of reconciling the evidence with YEC which we haven’t yet understood will become clear.
While I respect their honesty, I find it hard to imagine any way this could happen, even allowing for miracles (as I certainly do). Appealing to miracles just moves the problem: instead of requiring a scientific explanation, they now require a theological one.
I acknowledge that I could be wrong and YECs could be right, but to convince me, against the problem of “death before the Fall” on one side, I’d need to them to explain how this problem of false appearances is easier to reconcile with God’s holiness.
If it could be shown that this ‘Space Wine’ could be consumed without (i) it causing the drinker to immediately spit it out due to the terrible taste, and (ii) without it poisoning everybody who drank it, I’d be willing to admit the possibility of the aforementioned miracle happening without any (earthly) decay being involved.
Also, I am not up on the Koine Greek nomenclature, but in English “wine” means an alcoholic beverage formed by the fermentation of fruits, rather than alcoholic beverages more generally. I am aware that both beer and distilled spirits were also known back then, but not whether the Greeks had separate names for them.
I wasn’t saying that it precludes what you said about decay; just that Oderberg would certainly not deny the reality of change, since it’s central to his metaphysics. I agree that even in Oderberg’s metaphysical framework, his argument is a non sequitur.
With the levity theme aside for the moment, as a linguist I will simply point out for didactic purposes that (1) yes, the semantic domains are different in English and Greek (but that is largely irrelevant), and (2) a word is not necessarily employed because it specifies all of the connotations and denotations of a concept. [see FOOTNOTE.] Indeed, in this case, the mere fact that the wedding of Cana guests were EXPECTING more wine and what they received TASTED like wine (“the best wine”) was sufficient to justify the use of the term. There is no semantic basis for assuming, “OINOS [wine] in Greek always refers to fermented grape juice so therefore the Biblical text clearly states that the liquid MUST have been chemically identical to fermented grape juice.” No. Language doesn’t necessarily work that way—although fundamentalist hyper-literalists often assume it does.
FOOTNOTE: Language can be quite fun in these ways. Misleading actually. Guinea pigs are not pigs from Guinea—nor are they actually pigs anywhere else (if the standard for pigs is Sus americana.) Similarly, koala bear are not bears and mountain goats are not really goats; they are antelope. Flying lemurs aren’t even lemurs. And killer whales are actually in the dolphin family. In all these cases, words are chosen outside of their “proper semantics” because they bring to mind similarity to something else.
I did not intend to imply a match to the various discoveries of abiotic “wines” in various places (including meteors.) OBVIOUSLY, the composition of those found elsewhere in the universe would not be a convincing substitute. I was simply pointing to the existence of the abiotic ingredients.
I was simply positing—semi-whimsically to be sure—the concept that what the wedding guests at Cana assumed was “very good wine” could potentially meet that standard with an appropriate mix of abiotic ingredients. An origin in fermented grape juice was not required by the term OINOIS (wine) in the Greek text.
I find that the YECs around me quickly go ballistic when I point that (1) the Bible only states that there was no Imago Dei human death before the fall, and that (2) the reason those humans, Adam and Eve, didn’t succumb to the same death as was common in the creation around them was that they had access to the fruit of the Tree of Life. Why would an ANTIDOTE (the fruit) be necessary for their survival if the “POISON” (death) was not in existence and possible for them?
Tradition is a hard taskmaster. (I should know. I was raised in that “no death before the fall” tradition.)
Likewise, weeds existed all along. It’s just that Adam and Eve weren’t familiar with them because weeds are not something a creator would include in the garden he created in the Eden region.
Don’t think so. In a recently created universe, the stars have nothing to do with the right elements, and there is no structural reason for growth rings. These are just appearance of age for the sake of appearance of age. I would claim that most appearance of age serves no purpose.
I’ll give you one. Adam and Eve must both be created as adults, with various memories such as knowledge of language. For one thing, they can’t start as zygotes because there’s no womb for them. But they must, at “birth”, be able to survive in the garden.
I figure that wombs are how Adam and Eve were made “from the dust of the ground” (i.e., the soil) as with other hominids before and after them. Indeed, we are all made from “the dust of the ground”, which is why we eat food everyday (more “dust of the ground”.) I find that consistent with the text of Genesis.
I found that “summary” not to be particularly helpful, and not so much of a summary as a frequent digression into linguistic minutiae.
It did however contain a link to this article on “Essence”:
Essence (Latin: essentia) has various meanings and uses for different thinkers and in different contexts. It is used in philosophy and theology as a designation for the property or set of properties or attributes that make an entity the entity it is or, expressed negatively, without which it would lose its identity.
Does “‘abiotic wine’ with just water, ethanol, glycerol, and a few acids, tannins, sugars, and esters in some galactic blend” lose its Essence as wine?
My kneejerk reaction would be to answer “yes”. But then I remember that one of my favorite tipples is dry Madeira wine. Originally, Madeira wine differed from other fortified white wines in that it was ‘cooked’ by the slow (sail-powered) ocean voyages in hotter climes. However, such long ocean voyages were expensive, so technologies were soon developed to heat the wine on land. Does this mean that what I’ve been drinking has lost the Essence of Madeira wine? It is not clear to me that it has.
A Latin tag that I think I learned even before I studied Latin in highschool is mutatis mutandis – “changing the change”. Does changing the change that brings about an identical end-product negate the Essence of the original end-product?
Does creation of Socrates with both a 70yo body and a mind capable of his insights, ex nihilo, without him physically living through 70 years of ancient Greece (but potentially being created with his memories of doing so, in order to facilitate those insights) negate his Essence? I am not convinced.
Does an “Aristotelian framework” really give us greater insight into change and reality, or merely obscure it through its assumptions and/or limitations?
