…And God said, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own lyin’ eyes?” And lo, everyone was fine with that.
I’ll accept that YECs are a subset of Inerrantists, but I’ve seen plenty of bad apologetics that aren’t YEC. And Biblical Inerrancy is pretty obviously untrue.
It would have to be a pretty big fossil to be detectable on 3D seismic! ![]()
With few exceptions, all of them. Are you familiar with YEC?
Snelling - AiG, Sand Transported Cross Country
Now it logically follows that, when the Flood waters swept over the continents and rapidly deposited sediment layers across vast areas, these sediments had to have been transported long distances. In other words, the sediments in the strata had to come from distant sources.
If you are transporting sediment, you definitely have turbulence and are stirring a mixture of microscopic pollen, no matter what mechanism is at play.
Creationists Werner, Austin, Humphreys, Vardiman, and Wise, all model the flood as a high energy event with rapid plate tectonics driving seismic shocks. Clarey and Baumgardner specifically have continent crossing tsunami’s in megasequences.
I’m sorry, but that is wildly wrong. Walt Brown’s hydroplate theory has large portions of the earth’s crust being blasted far off into SPACE from catastrophic release of supercritical water!!!
It would have to be a pretty big fossil to be detectable on 3D seismic!
True that! Even great seismic resolution is on the order of meters. But we can tie one reflector to one bed with a specific foram assemblage from a reference well, follow that bed by seismic for many miles, drill a new hole and hit that bed and get the same foram soup.
Biblical Inerrancy is pretty obviously untrue.
I can understand why you say that, but FYI, there are a number of caveats in the Chicago Statement for things you might call errors that they don’t. Eg, copying errors. And the gospel writers sometimes told events in thematic rather than chronological order, but this was not a falsehood by the standards of their time.
There’s plenty of issues not covered by either. The differences between the Nativity stories for instance. I grant you could cover the differences in the stories of Judas’ death by saying that Peter got it wrong, but in my experience Inerrantists don’t even take that out.
I never found the last acts of Judas problem all that problematic. (The “contradictions” are easily resolved, in my opinion.) On the other hand, I find the Quirinius Census far more interesting and perplexing.
Now that I’m long retired, I can safely say that I have both agreements and disagreements with the Chicago Statement. (I was there for the last of the three conferences but only as support staff, not as a “delegate.”) But even though the drafting committees were very conservative and in many ways “traditional”, they were not necessarily as “inerrantist” in today’s most strict sense that many people assume.
If there’s an easy resolution then I haven’t seen it. To my mind the most significant difference is that Matthew has Judas overcome with remorse, while that is completely absent in the story attributed to Peter in Acts.
It’s only perplexing if you insist on the stories being more than stories - I think there was a purpose in those stories but neither is any more historical than Suetonius’ stories about the birth of Augustus in The Twelve Caesars
There is actually a fair bit of scholarship pointing to them being honest, eyewitness accounts, reliably transmitted. Peter J Williams “Can We Trust the Gospels?”" is a good entry point.
I don’t like to be too cynical about such things, but if we applied the same Operational/Historical criteria to this as YEC apply to mainstream science, then we ought not to accept the Gospels any more than YEC accept “Historical” science.
Again, that is far too cynical, and not what I really think. BUT it might be fair if we play by the same rules as the other team.
I don’t think adopting bad methods would help the conversation. And FWIW, I’m decidedly on Team Jesus. ![]()
But I think it’s fair to point out to YECs that past events leave evidence that we can examine in the present to test different hypotheses about the past, and that this is just as true in geology as it is in a murder trial or in deciding whether Jesus rose from the dead.
When Bart Ehrman concedes that Jesus really lived, taught, and was crucified, and that his disciples really thought they had seen him alive again, up close and personal, on multiple occasions, including touching him and eating with him, but Ehrman explains that as a group hallucination - well, it sounds like he’s evoking a different kind of miracle.
Christianity of all religions ought to lean into the discoverability of the past.
Yes, but I would strongly suspect that the vast majority of this “fair bit of scholarship” would be from conservative evangelical scholars, with a strong predisposition towards this claim of “honest, eyewitness accounts, reliably transmitted”, and even that in many cases, their jobs would depend, through institutional Statements of Faith and the like, on being seen to support such claims.
I would suspect that this “fair bit of scholarship” would be contradicted by a fair bit of contrary scholarship that would take the view that Williams and his ilk overstate their case.
The case of the Quirinius Census was mentioned earlier in this thread. Do you, or Williams, claim that Luke’s narrative of it sending Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem is “honest, eyewitness accounts, reliably transmitted”? I have seen it described as a “pious fraud”, and would suspect that it would be difficult to fit it into your description without doing considerable injury to such words as “honest”, “eyewitness” and “reliable”.
The Nativity accounts are certainly not eyewitness testimony. Indeed none of Luke is considered eyewitness testimony - and I very much doubt that Williams argues otherwise. It is highly unlikely that either Mark or Matthew are written by eyewitnesses - and the idea that both are eyewitness accounts is incompatible with scholarship. It is questionable if John is written by an eyewitness, even if we exclude the known interpolations - and the author admits that his intent is to persuade (20:31)
Here you are making a fundamental category error between “historical science” and “history”, and even more to the point, “eyewitness testimony”.
Like equated here?
Since the past is unobservable, studying evidence from the past, such as fossils, requires historical facts, reliable sources, or eyewitness testimony to provide clues to the events that occurred. Therefore, biblical-creation scientists rely on the perfect eyewitness testimony of Jesus Christ found in the inerrant Holy Bible. The Bible is the only fully accurate source to interpret the events from the past and to analyze the evidence seen in the present.
As Christians, we have the perfect Word of God to provide the historical reference. The Bible is the starting point to interpret the evidence from the past, understand the processes observable in the present, and anticipate the events yet to come.
Jennifer Rivera - AiG - Is Historical Science Useful?
Except that Bart Ehrman does not concede that much, does he? He may believe that one or more of the appearances described in 1 Corinthians 15 was a group hallucination - but there is no mention of anyone touching or eating with Jesus there.
This looks like exactly what I was speaking of. Apologists cannot be trusted.
Got a source for that claim?
I’ve been in such arguments. It might actually be less productive that arguing against a Flood. ![]()
I have come to the conclusion that certain claims don’t need to be argued, particularly when nothing concrete can come of it. I note that people sometimes present claims because they want to argue. ![]()
My interest in such arguments is, at best, tenuous and tepid (though I will admit to an ongoing morbid curiosity about the Quirinius Census – it seems such an absurd oddity, and defenses of it create amusement in their creativity, if not their plausibility).
A more interesting question, to me at least, is whether there is such a thing as good apologetics, including in that term the “confessional scholarship”[1] that Peter J. Williams indulges in. Are we wrong to, in @nathanlong’s words, “paint all ‘apologists’ with the same brush”?
Regardless of its label, apologetics, by definition, consists of taking a fixed conclusion and tailoring the evidence and the analysis to fit it. This generally results in the evidence being cherry-picked and/or selectively emphasised and de-emphasised, bare possibilities (and even stacked bare possibilities) presented as plausible, and steps in the argument skipped or assumed.
This creates two problems for the skeptical observer.
Is the putative ‘better’ apologetics more valid, or simply more sophisticated in how it obfuscates its flaws?
Even if, by happenstance, an apologist makes a valid argument for a true conclusion, how would a skeptical observer know this? It will be presented with the exact same level of confidence and certitude as an invalid argument for a false conclusion.
This does not render apologists’ arguments inherently wrong, but it does render them inherently untrustworthy. For this reason I think it is legitimate to “paint all ‘apologists’ with the same brush.”