Are Young Earth Creationists Generally Stupid?

I am glad you describe this as a 'not so good answer' Juv. It means your claim the earth is millions rather than billions of years old is based, not on scripture, nor on scientific evidence, but because you want it to be true because you don't like evolution.

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Tom I only have your words to go on, and strangely I'm not the only one who thinks you're proposing a veiled creation. Why do you think that could be?

If the sophisticated YECer is simply to propose their own 'interpretations' on the physical evidence then how is that any different to what happens now? Except that you expect them to keep their YEC beliefs out of science (I still see no reason why they would abide by this), but then aren't their interpretations going to be based on a YEC framework? If not, then just how would their interpretations differ from the prevailing scientific viewpoint? Any differing 'interpretaions' by sophisticated YECers would simply be identified as being rooted in creationism, summarily dismissed and hey presto back to square 1. Your idea solves nothing and simply creates different problems, I mean exactly why should a YECer keep their YEC worldview out of the science they perform, apart from you telling them it's a good idea to?

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I said it is not that good exactly because it would make people think the way you think. It is not just that. In addition to the said reason, I do think the earth is young based on theological reasons.

Hundreds of millions of years is not young, it is what Old Earth Creationists thought before radiometric dating.

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Originally Posted by Tom Cohoe

Science is about what it looks like, about the appearance of things. What reality actually is doesn't have to correspond with what it looks like at all. It is logically possible that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago and that it and the rest of the universe were created to look like it all began with a the Big Bang over thirteen billion years ago, and that the species evolved slowly over hundreds of millions of years.

Nice restatement of the Oomphalos argument. This fails on theological grounds. It is terrible religion. If you believe this, you end up destroying Christianity. Creationists try to recycle old arguments, ignoring the reasons those arguments were discarded in the first place.

In 1844 a pamphlet entitled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, espousing an evolutionary viewpoint, was published. In response Philip Gosse, a minister in the Fundamentalist group called the Plymouth Brethren, wrote Oomphalos, published in 1857. In it Gosse made the first written argument that creation only LOOKS old. Notice that this is the same argument you are making. In it, Gosse even argued that Adam and Eve had navels because that is what one would expect in God-created creatures.
Gosse expected Oomphalos to be attacked by scientists. What he should have expected, but didn't, was the denunciation by the religious community. Asked to write a review of Oomphalos, his friend Charles Kingsley, a minister and author of Westward Ho! refused and wrote the following letter to Gosse.
"You have given the 'vestiges of creation theory' [the pamphlet discussed above] the best shove forward which it has ever had. I have a special dislike for that book; but, honestly, I felt my heart melting towards it as I read Oomphalos. Shall I tell you the truth? It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt the doctrine of absolute creation, and I fear it will make hundreds do so. Your book tends to prove this - that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes God-the-Sometime-Deceiver. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in ...your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ...believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind. To this painful dilemma you have brought me, and will, I fear, bring hundreds. It will not make me throw away my Bible. I trust and hope. I know in whom I have believed, and can trust Him to bring my faith safe through this puzzle, as He has through others; but for the young I do fear. I would not for a thousand pounds put your book into my children's hands."

And I would not, for any amount of money, teach this doctrine to anyone's children! This doctrine/argument makes God into the Prince of Lies. God tells lies. We must trust God for promises He made: resurrection, forgiveness of sins, etc. Now you say that God lies. How would we know that God did not lie about these things too?

No, it is not stupid to believe that the universe was created in 6 days in 4004 BC, as calculated by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, around 1650.

Yes, it is. It makes God a liar.

Remember, science is about what things looks like, not about what the fundamental underlying truth actually is. That is beyond science.

This is the argument the Catholic Church tried to use with heliocentrism. Planets don't really orbit the sun in elliptical orbits; it just looks that way. Didn't work out too well for them. It isn't going to work out any better here.

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890

God the deceiver and the liar, eh? Since 1857?

Is that the best you've got? Sheesh.

How about: we aren't supposed to be able to find God through a sceptical approach (science) so if science could uncover evidence of the creation miracle as written in Genesis God would be discoverable without faithful seeking. For that reason, I would expect any miracle to be hidden. It would be hidden, not because God is a liar, but because we are fallen.

See, it's our fault, not God's. So, maybe a 150 year old reaction isn't the last word after all.

I don't really care what was said in 1857, or any other time, if it contains nothing more than a dogma that, you know, that a God who requires faith to know him is a liar if he doesn't leave evidence of his work all over the place like a common thief who hasn't got the brains to hide the evidence of what he's done. Just wait 6000 years and man with his science will be smarter than God and embarrass him in the act (of creation).

Are you actually telling me that this dogma has stood for 150 years without challenge?

Since I brought up the issue of accelerated tectonics, and I caught up the first show of 2012 yesterday, I like to make this comment:

The extreme version of the "accelerated tectonics" described in the movie 2012 is very interesting. In fact, it gives very good hints to the mechanism of the Global Flood. Of course, God says the Flood will never happen again. So I am talking about the first and the only one happened before.

Juvenissun, I can see that you do not seperate science from religion. I had thought, based on your profile message, that you did.

Well, I won't argue that issue. On this forum it is listed as an unorthodox belief and that description certainly fits. As far as I know, nothing says an unorthodox "Christian" is not saved. I don't think salvation is a matter of correct beliefs but a matter of faith. Nevertheless, they are unorthodox. There are reasons the apostles and Church fathers fought vigorously against what they called heresies and one of the most difficult battles was against the prevailing ideas known collectively as Gnosticism. One of the theological difficulties of YEC, including and possibly especially your 'sophisticated YEC' is that it turns well-meaning Christians into de facto Gnostics and a lot of it revolves around what we are speaking of when we say "God created the heavens and the earth."

Well, what world did God create? A world that is 6,000 years old.
But what world do we experience? A world that is 13.7 billion years old.
The world we experience is not what God created.


Could that be? Maybe, in some other religion, maybe if we are speaking of some other God. Not in Christianity, not if we are speaking of the God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, Elijah and in Jesus.

Look at how, in the New Testament, the apostles continually affirm the reality of who Jesus was. "What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands..." 1John 1:1

They appeal to the testimony of their senses as a reliable witness of reality. But a YEC approach to the universe requires one to believe that our senses cannot be a reliable witness of reality. Nothing our senses tell us about the universe is real. Nothing science tells us about the universe is real.

Yet, the Psalmist tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God. What heavens? The spurious heavens that God never made? Surely the only heavens that can declare the glory of God are heavens that were really created? But according to YEC understanding, we cannot perceive those heavens--we only see a simulacrum, not a genuine creation. The genuine creation, the one that is really only 6,000 years old, is inaccessible to us.




They go together.


Ah, but it does--on two bases. First, that they present themselves as Christians and so draw any scorn to Christians as well as themselves. Second, because the cost of preserving YEC, sophisticated or not, is to destroy a fundamental relationship of truth and trust between ourselves and our Creator.

A religion that cannot be based in and consistent with the physical reality that God created is not a biblically-based religion. It does not understand creation to be the reality which our ancestors in the faith believed it to be--a genuine creation which, through our experience of it, witnesses to its Maker.

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"Either we've got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy - and then admit that we just don't wanna do it." Steve Colbert

How should I modify my profile so you won't misunderstand?