age/expansion of the universe

[Tinker Grey]

And, Tinker, one can argue about whether slow creation is as impressive as quick creation. I think the latter is obviously more impressive, but I also understand that I can't demand that conclusion of another.

I appreciate your admission (that you can't demand...). My point is that the only perspective that matters on slow or quick is God's. And, to a God outside time, it is a meaningless question. Quite possibly the universe is complete from start of time to end of time. Consider that if the universe lasts another trillion years, it is still finished and complete and resting in God's "hand". To God, any societies that exist a billion years from now or even after our sun collapses are "current".

Our perception of fast or slow is completely meaningless to God.

 

[shernren]

I would add that an omnipotent God would presumably be able to communicate clearly about what He has done.

Of course. And God quite clearly told the Israelites that He created the heavens and the earth, and He told it in a way that emphasized His sole divinity and majesty, completely invalidated the rampant polytheism of its time, and elevated the Sabbath as the symbol of allegiance for a holy people.

Now some modern folks think it means a literal six days, in opposition to the clear witness of nature created by God Himself. To which all I can say is: Yes, some miscommunication has occurred. I'm pretty sure the fault's not God's, though ...

 

[Assyrian]

Quote:
And of course we come back to the question of whether the standard is what scripture says, not what we think.

What scripture says is not the issue. The question is what it means. But you seem to come out with these phrases, 'the standard is what scripture says' as if that means scripture should be interpreted literally. But that simply doesn't work, not when so much of scripture was written as metaphor and parable. But I know you understand this. The only question is whether Genesis is one of the metaphorical passages. You think it isn't, we think it is.

There we diverge on whether God literally said "six days" or he didn't.

Not that either. It does not matter whether God literally said "six days" what difference would it have made if instead he inspired Moses to write "six days"?

Even if God literally said "six days" the issue is whether he was talking about six literal days. Jesus literally said he was a door. He wasn't talking about being a literal door.

 

[Mallon]

Even if God literally said "six days" the issue is whether he was talking about six literal days. Jesus literally said he was a door. He wasn't talking about being a literal door.

I'm with busterdog. I also think the author of Genesis literally meant the earth was created in six 24-hour days.
I just don't think this timeframe needs to be in concordance with science, given that the Bible wasn't written with scientific concerns in mind. Moses believed the earth was literally created in six days, just as he believe the earth was literally flat. The message is not to be confused with the medium.

 

[Assyrian]

I'm with busterdog. I also think the author of Genesis literally meant the earth was created in six 24-hour days.
I just don't think this timeframe needs to be in concordance with science, given that the Bible wasn't written with scientific concerns in mind. Moses believed the earth was literally created in six days, just as he believe the earth was literally flat. The message is not to be confused with the medium.

I would not have a problem with it if that were the case. There are plenty of of geocentric and flat earth passages in scripture that show us God speaking his message through the mediums of the cosmology people understood.

However the six days are different. The metaphorical use of day was understood even from the earliest documents, we even have it in Gen 2:4 where the whole work of creation is described as happening in a day. The most famous verse we have describing a non literal interpetation of God's days is in a Psalm attributed to Moses.

Did the writer of Exodus think God was weary after creation and was refreshed after having a rest? It is not just the science that is at fault in the Sabbath command then, there is a very primitive and limited view of who God is too.

The alternative is that author of Exodus was actually the very intelligent sophisticated thinker, instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, as Acts describes him. He may not have known the earth wasn't flat, but he did know how to weave rich anthropomorphic metaphors and use them to teach and establish the social reform that was the Sabbath rest (cf exodus 23:12). The six day creation is in the middle of this anthropomorphism in Exodus, Even the Genesis account seems written or at least edited to teach Sabbath observance.

If you take the framework interpetation of Genesis 1, it is saying that the framework really is there, that it was written as a framework describing creation thematically, not as a literal history.

 

[mindlight]

And that involves interpretation of scripture. So you need to show the hermeneutics that
connect the "broad message" to the actual fall.

I think this discussion is doing that.

Later? When were they not wild?

Having read up a bit more on this I retract this particular argument about animals. While the lion may indeed lie
down with the lamb in the future this does not seem to have been the way from the beginning and indeed God says things
like "Cursed are you among wild animals" implying the existence of wild animals at that stage and therefore the
meaningfulness of the phrase.
In the Biblical account the animals and mankind are shown to have deep interconnections. Man names them, God seems to
tether the wild animals and restrain them from harming Adam and Eve in Eden. When God looks at the world shortly
before the flood he determines to wipe out not only mankind but also the animals as if the two were linked together and
that because man had gone bad so had the animal kingdom also. When he decides to save Noah his plan of salvation
includes an ark which will preserve the animal kingdom as well as mankind and allows wild animals and humans to coexist
on the ark in a peaceful relationship.

I disagree. The flood takes place on earth and nothing indicates that the destruction involved the cosmos as a
whole.

The level of disruption to the earths configuration indicates seismic activity of unprecedented levels. The deeps
were opened and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The whole earth was flooded. Following this catastrophe
lifespans plumeted and it seems that the year lengthened from 360 days to 365 days. This kind of disruption is
indicative of something that may have changed the earths orbit and totally rewritten the whole pattern of its land and
sea relationship but this does not necessarily imply any major activity beyond the experience of our own star.

This, of course, assumes that the ages recorded were literal years as we know them. And that takes us back to
shernren's early questions. If the fall & flood so disrupted nature as to make uniformitarian assumptions invalid, why
are you assuming the uniform length of year?

The book of Genesis is written in a literal historical genre and there is no reason to discriminate between the texts
about geneaology and those about the life of Noah or Abraham for instance.

And how do we know the ages have not been mistranslated from a non-decimal to a decimal base? Ancient
Mesopotamia used a base-60 not a base-10 number system.

The bible itself gives no credence to such extra biblical sources.

You see, there are all sorts of interpretive matters that crop up when you start trying to tie texts together.
The story of the fall, as given does not include any of the concepts you are adding to it.

The fall introduces death to humankind, decay to the universe as a whole (Romans 8) and a curse on the ground that man must now work for his food.

Well, in my frame of reference, humans were already subject to biological death anyway. I believe Adam and Eve
were created mortal, as all biological beings are. If they had no access to the Tree of Life, they would die in Eden
just as well as outside of Eden.

I have to admit this view has credibility though I lack the biblical evidence to either reject it or endorse it.

I have no problem with creation from the first, exhibiting the cycle of biological birth, death and decay. Eden
would not have been habitable without that cycle in place. There could have been no ripening of fruits, no eating, no
digestion, no growth, no maturing of seeds, no reproduction, none of the things we associate with life had the
biological cycle not been established.

There are ecosystems that thrive without Winter. I would expect the eco systems of Eden to have been more viral than
those of our modern world and to have a greater capacity for recovery. As to whether plants died or decayed before the fall. I am not sure either way but what you say makes sense and plants would have formed the staple food of animals as well as humans so I would have expected the behave normally except without toxic side effects.

Because nature was not created to teach us the character of God. It reveals, as Paul says, that there is a creator and speaks of his power, majesty and glory. But it does not speak of his holiness, righteousness, compassion, mercy, justice or love. OTOH, nature was created by God who, (we know from revelation) does not lie. So it was created to reveal the truth about itself.

It may have once revealed the truth about itself but it is not clear that it still does. There may be things creation initially revealed about God which it no longer reveals conclusively e.g his loving care, and his goodness.

Sure, but scripture never says that the truthfulness of God or God's natural handiwork is what has gone wrong. It is we humans who have gone wrong. Our sin does affect nature, but there are limits to how much we can affect nature. We cannot change its fundamental properties.

Cursed ground does not reveal the goodness of God, exile from Eden does not speak of his loving provision. It was not just humans who fell it was also angels. The physical universes relationship with the spiritual realm is what is at issue here. The disruption in the relationship with the Eternal God disrupts space and time in ways we have not begun to grasp and distorts the evidences that modern science parades as proofs for its theories about the age and the nature of the developmental processes in the universe.

Who says these things are wrong? Shernren has earlier posted passages from Job where God glories in the savagery of carnivores. And I remember reading that the dynamic nature of earth's geology is one of the things that makes life on earth possible. Planets without earth-like tectonic activity are not habitable.

God created wild animals and Job talks about how even the Leviathan can be reeled in and controlled by God. The deisgn the beauty and the character of the animals are all things that God envisaged before the creation of the world. Not sure why tectonic activity is essential to human life over the kind of time periods YECs envisage. The world shaking seismic activity of the flood is painted in mainly negative terms for human life as it anticipates mans destruction in punishment for his sin.

Neither do scientists. We know from the evidence that stars must have existed, not only before people, but long before the whole solar system. This is not an assumption.

I edited my original comment within 20 minutes of posting - wow you jumped on my post quickly. But yes a YEC believes that man was created within days of the stars which is a radically different perspective on the universe.

And I would note that most of what we know deep down is not meant to be is the brokenness of human relationships which
permits the needless deaths of thousands of children daily from malnutrition and lack of access to simple medical care,
the enslavement of children, the sexual trafficking of women (predicted to be more profitable than the drug trade
within 15 years), the horrendous death toll in places like Darfur and the rape of nature and its resources by short-
sighted corporate practices and policies.

Human injustice stinks as does our conscious or unconscious participation in it.

What do we find in untampered nature that comes anywhere near being as woefully wrong as human activities? Even where things go wrong in nature, it is usually human activity that is at the root of the problem e.g. climate change.

The effects of human activity on the climate are as yet minimal compared with natural cycles such as iceages for instance. I can think of recent tsunamis whose effects had little to do with climate change and much to do with your much loved tectonic movements and dynamic geology. A single asteroid strike on earth would have effects beyond anything ever inflicted by man. Naturally occuring plagues, swarms of locusts etc can all be devastating. So now there is no usually about it - devastating things can happen and will occur in the future that will dwarf the worst human injustices. Nature itself has gone badly wrong and is capable of doing much worse than it already has. I do not believe that this was always so.

Not really. What you are adopting is a denial of the anthropic principle altogether. You are assuming that there can be a fundamental cosmic disruption in how the universe works and still be a habitable universe. What physics tells us is that this is not possible.

Flawed physics about a flawed universe comesto whatever conclusion abou things outside its remit or the area in which its conclusions can be proven- ummm ... not that impressed!

I don't know much physics, but I think many who know even less than me are not aware of how fine a line there is
between the existence and non-existence of a habitable universe is. Consider just this one item:

"Researchers have calculated that if the universe had expanded ever so slightly faster or slower than it did (even by
as little as a trillionth of a percent), the matter in our cosmos would have either quickly collapsed into a black hole
or spread out so rapidly that it would have evaporated.” [Duane Elgin, "Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for
Humanity’s Future" (New York, NY : William Morrow, 2000) 47]
bolding added
And that is only one of some twenty-odd parameters that in theory can have a wide range of values, but, if you want a
habitable universe must be restricted to the tiniest range of values. The same sort of thing can be said about the mass
of the electron (a bit heavier or a bit lighter and atoms are not possible), the strength of the electric charges on
atom and proton, the strength of gravity vs that of the strong nuclear force, etc. etc. etc.
If any of those values are off by the tiniest amount, the universe does not exist. At least, not in any form in which
stars, planets, life and people are possible.

You do not have to prove to me that life the universe and everything is miraculous. But a God who is able to create such a miracle is also able to sustain life even in the tarnished version of his initially good creation. We did not happen by accident and the programmer of the universe can handle a mere 20 variables with considerable ease.

So I ask: did stars, planets, life and people exist before the flood? before the fall?
Do stars, planets, life and peopel exist after the flood? after the fall?

Yes

If the answer to all these questions is "Yes" it follows that anything as fundamental as these properties are to the existence of atoms, stars, planets, life and people cannot have been affected by the fall or the flood.

The nature of creations relationship with its designer has changed - this is the fundamental reality and the reason why we exist at all in the universe before or after the fall.

By the way, Duane Elgin from whom the quote above comes is a theist. The next sentence in the paragraph is "Such
amazing precision implies a living intelligence is at work."
That same precision also indicates that this living intelligence did not alter anything that would uncreate creation as
a consequence of the fall.

How precise can one be about things one cannot see, measure accurately or observe over significant time periods e.g. thousands of years. I doubt Elgin but not God!!

 

[gluadys]

The level of disruption to the earths configuration indicates seismic activity of unprecedented levels.

Nothing in the text indicates seismic activity at all, certainly not unprecedented levels of seismic activity.

it seems that the year lengthened from 360 days to 365 days.

The text does not indicate that either. "It seems..." shows this is a human interpretation of the text. But there is nothing in the text to indicate a change in year length, even on a "seeming" basis.

In fact, 360 days is an idealized lunar year, and lunar calendars were in widespread use in biblical times. 365 days is an idealized solar year (as the year is actually a bit longer, hence the need for leap years, or leap months, every so often.) The Hebrew calendar to this day is a lunar calendar with an extra month inserted every so often to bring it back into line with the solar year. The standard Western calendar is a solar calendar with provision made for an extra day every four years to accommodate the extra hours per year.

This kind of disruption is
indicative of something that may have changed the earths orbit

You see how you keep adding and adding and adding more and more imaginative details to a text that makes no reference at all to such things. The bible as a whole never once refers to the earth's orbit, yet you want to read into the flood text a change in the earth's orbit.

This is extravagant eisegesis. Nothing in the biblical story suggests this level of cosmic catastrophe. Quite the contrary, we have the recommencement of olive trees producing leaves even before Noah leaves the ark and the production of ripe grapes within a few months afterward.

The book of Genesis is written in a literal historical genre

A highly debatable assertion!

The bible itself gives no credence to such extra biblical sources.

Actually, the bible gives credence to several extra-biblical sources e.g. the Book of Jasher, the book of the Wars of Yahweh, the book of Enoch, etc.

A numbering system, btw, has nothing to do with credence. One numbering system is as good as another as the numbers themselves don't change, just the numerals. The number eight refers to eight objects whether it is written as VIII, 8 or 1000 (binary code) But errors can occur when converting from one to another. For example, if I had not specified binary code above, a person assuming I was using a base ten system would read 1000 as one thousand instead of as eight.

The fall introduces death to humankind, decay to the universe as a whole (Romans 8) and a curse on the ground that man must now work for his food.

And none of that suggests any fundamental change to the physics of the cosmos. An electron is still an electron, a photon is still a photon, gravity is still gravity.

I would expect the eco systems of Eden to have been more viral than
those of our modern world

Viral? is that a typo for "vital" or are you getting at something else here?

As to whether plants died or decayed before the fall. I am not sure either way but what you say makes sense and plants would have formed the staple food of animals as well as humans so I would have expected the behave normally except without toxic side effects.

As for animals, you might consider the final step in an ordinary digestive process. Without decay to break it down, how does an ecology handle excrement? (Interestingly coprolites, which are fossilized deposits of excrement, provide much information about the ecology in which the animal that produced it lived.)

It may have once revealed the truth about itself but it is not clear that it still does.

There is no clear scriptural reason to suppose otherwise. Only those who hold to an interpretation of scripture at odds with the testimony of creation doubt creation's witness to itself. So the wish to validate one's hermeneutical commitment fathers the doubt about the capacity of God's handiwork to witness to itself.

You need an independent reason for the suspicion to render it credible. No creationist up into the 19th century doubted the capacity of nature to be its own witness.

There may be things creation initially revealed about God which it no longer reveals conclusively e.g his loving care, and his goodness.

Maybe, but this has nothing to do with whether a radioactive isotope has a particular half-life or how far a star is from our observation point.

Cursed ground does not reveal the goodness of God, exile from Eden does not speak of his loving provision.

Is God's justice not good? Is his mercy not good? The story of the fall shows both.

The physical universes relationship with the spiritual realm is what is at issue here.

No, we are in agreement on that. What is at issue is whether this upset the relation of the physical universe with itself.

The disruption in the relationship with the Eternal God disrupts space and time in ways we have not begun to grasp

Where does scripture say this? Or is this more of your overactive imagination playing around with the text?

and distorts the evidences that modern science parades as proofs for its theories about the age and the nature of the developmental processes in the universe.

Or is it your commitment to an untenable hermeneutic that fuels an unreasonable suspicion of God's handiwork?

The world shaking seismic activity of the flood is painted in mainly negative terms for human life as it anticipates mans destruction in punishment for his sin.

What world-shaking seismic activity? A flood is not a seismic activity and does not necessitate seismic activity either as cause or effect.

I edited my original comment within 20 minutes of posting - wow you jumped on my post quickly.

By coincidence I had just come online.

But yes a YEC believes that man was created within days of the stars which is a radically different perspective on the universe.

And that is why starlight poses a conundrum for a YEC perspective. Had the stars been created in their current locations only days before humanity, none would have been visible to Adam and Eve. It takes four years for the light of the nearest star to reach us, and only a handful of stars in the galaxy are within 6,000 light years. Yet ancient records show that many stars much farther than 6,000 lightyears away were known in ancient times. Given the YEC perspective there should be no biblical reference to a constellation such as Orion and the Pleiades, because such constellations would be unknown. The history of astronomy should be mainly the recording of the appearance of new stars. We should be continuing to see new stars within our galaxy every century or so. And we should not have any inkling of the existence of any other galaxy. No extra-galactic light has had anywhere near enough time to reach us and most of the light within the galaxy has not either.

The effects of human activity on the climate are as yet minimal compared with natural cycles such as iceages for instance.

Hardly! Unless remedial action is taken quickly, the effect of human activity on the climate is set to surpass that of the last ice ages. Only in the other direction. Yesterday I participated in a rally in which we Canadians expressed our shame and disgust at our current government's policy of sabotaging the Kyoto protocol and the Kyoto+ negotiations.

I can think of recent tsunamis whose effects had little to do with climate change and much to do with your much loved tectonic movements and dynamic geology. A single asteroid strike on earth would have effects beyond anything ever inflicted by man. Naturally occuring plagues, swarms of locusts etc can all be devastating. So now there is no usually about it - devastating things can happen and will occur in the future that will dwarf the worst human injustices.

Those things are devastating, but they are not as bad as the least injustice because they are not sinful. Injustice is.

Nature itself has gone badly wrong

Name one of the above occurrences that is "wrong" and explain why it is wrong.

Flawed physics

What aspect of physics is flawed? The mass of the electron? The force of gravity? The structure of an atomic nucleus? The effects of electromagnetism?

Even if I were to accept your unsupported claims of unprecedented seismic activity and a change in the orbit of the earth, none of this touches basic physics or makes it flawed. So this sounds like even wilder imaginative speculation conjured up only to support your incredulity when it comes to listening to God's creation testify of itself.

You do not have to prove to me that life the universe and everything is miraculous. But a God who is able to create such a miracle is also able to sustain life even in the tarnished version of his initially good creation.

If that same God made the universe in such a way that it was habitable only within very narrow settings on the parameter "dials", then he can sustain it only if he maintains those settings. To stray outside those narrow settings would not just tarnish creation. It would annihilate creation.

We did not happen by accident and the programmer of the universe can handle a mere 20 variables with considerable ease.

The God who creates physics as the foundation of material existence cannot maintain material existence if he chooses to destroy that foundation. Even God's choices have consequences.

The nature of creations relationship with its designer has changed -

I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is the unsupported spectulation that this involves changes in nature's relationship with itself on such a fundamental level that the very fabric of nature would be destroyed.

How precise can one be about things one cannot see, measure accurately or observe over significant time periods e.g. thousands of years. I doubt Elgin but not God!!

If a mere thousands of years is enough to cast measurements in doubt we have no basis on which to point to the findings of archeologists as substantiating anything in scripture. Yet creationists often do this.

A basic course in physics could do wonders for your problems of personal incredulity.

 

[mindlight]

Correct. However, this also has implications related to real size and apparent size.

These effects relate to magnification I am talking about aberrations, and distortions in what we see. Dark matter for example is a theoretical way of dealing with some of the observed anomalies in the universe - the amounts of mass, observed gravitational distortions etc. Yet apparently dark matter is not that dark as the stars shine uninterrupted though it. So we have a cloud of somethings or various diffferent kinds of clouds of matter that cannot be observed except in terms of its effects and we know very little about it. What effect does this or that kind of dark matter have on mass, energy, light even time. If distortions like this are apparent in the universe but not quantifiable except in terms of their effects how can we measure much based on the narrow range of matter that we can observe. There is so much more to our universe that what we can see and even large parts of the physical universe may in fact be out of phase with the rest of what is observable and yet interactive in some mysterious way with it. Even as Voyager makes its lonely way from our sun and its batteries are no longer recharged by solar light from our star it has no way of reportign what it passes through. It becomes more and more unreachable and more and more blind the further it goes. And so it is with mankind also we are blind to the universes mysteries yet speak with too much confidence about them.

I am not sure what sort of distortion you are suggesting, but in relation to the speed of light, any variation will lead to mathematical consequences.

The visibility of the dust rings gave us an apparent size. Assuming the speed of light to be c gave us an estimated "real" size. The correlation of these two figures gives us a distance. And, again assuming the speed of light to be c, this gives us the age of the star.

Because all these figures are interconnected, changing one variable will change them all. The only fixed figure is the observed apparent size. If the speed of light is faster, that means the estimate of the real size must increase (since the light must have travelled farther within the same time frame). Since the apparent size does not increase, it is the distance that must increase. For a larger object must be farther away to produce the same apparent size. Therefore, although the light is assumed to be travelling faster, it also has a longer distance to cover. You haven't gained anything in terms of reducing the age of the star. It is still around 168,000 light years away, although "lightyear" is a longer distance.

Our maths is bunk since it is based on assumptions of universal laws drawn from a single solar system, since it fails to quantify and explain the effects of the unobservable realms of our universe. So your calculations collapse and you can no longer explain life if even one variable changes. You and your friends did not have information about the uttermost reaches of space and time to do the maths in the first place!

 

[mindlight]

Godwin? The Nazis had no idea of natural selection.

Social darwinism - herbert spencer et al fruitful soil for nazi doctrines

 

[mindlight]

I am puzzled when posits that God would be incompetant if he created over x-number of years.

I grant you its not for any creature to call the One who made Him incompetent. Anyone who for even a brief moment has looked at the complexity of amino acids or human biology and marvelled at how the miracle of life could ever come together should wonder at the genius of its Creator. Still having looked for a moment at this miracle of life I believe that a God who could do it in 6 days is more credible than one who did it in 13 billion years.

Isn't a rather standard bit of theology that God is outside of time?

I am not a Deist I believe that God transcends and is immanent in His creation. It is in the incarnation that we see this most clearly as the Eternal God and historical man coexist in one person. So there is both a view of Eternity and a timeline in our creation and both our valid ways of interpreting it. What God could have done on a blink of an eye he said he did in 6 days, why deny the literal truth of that view if the Eternal God has said it?

If so, then all of creation was (perhaps) instantaneous ... AND it is all complete and finished ... AND that includes the end of it all. The end is already over for a being outside of time. I sometimes picture God holding an n-dimensional object (which I necessarily picture as 3-D), the universe, in his hand. Sometimes he holds the object such that the "beginning" is in the palm of his (metaphorical) hand while he contemplates the "end" of the object. Then he flips it over and contemplates the "beginning".

Any given moment is just a cross-section of a completed thing.

How could anyone think this diminishes God?

That God holds the whole of time and space in the palm of his hand is not in dispute. He chose to enter into that fragile creation of his own and interact with its creatures and save them from the terrible consequences of their worst choices. Eternity does not cancel out history it redeems it.

 

[gluadys]

Social darwinism - herbert spencer et al fruitful soil for nazi doctrines

Which, of course, was Spencer's misinterpretation of evolution wrongfully applied to justify his ultra-conservative social policies. Has virtually nothing to do with ToE. So you are just confirming that the Nazis knew nothing of natural selection.

In any case, I was not misidentifying Spencer as Godwin, but referring to Godwin's Law.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

 

[mindlight]

Kind of like how Earth became so much less significant when heliocentrism was accepted?

Whose to say where the physical centre of the universe is? Of course the earth goes round the sun.

How is God's competence involved? Does accepting evolution mean God became less capable? I don't see where this inhibits God's abilities as creator. He is still the maker and sustainer of life, isn't He?

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

Matthew 6:26-33 NIV

Our heavenly Father takes care of the birds now, why wouldn't he take care of them back then? Is the state of birds different in a world after the fall according to Creationism from birds in a world according to the Theory of Evolution?

I will definitely agree to that.

Elaborate? I don't see how God's sovereignty is affected by evolution.

I would still believe in God if the universe were old. Macro-evolution is harder to accept but if God had done it like that I would accept that also as I did when I was a younger Christian. I simply do not believe that the God I see in scripture acts in such an indiscriminate and brutal manner. Sovereignty of God if one believes in Theistic evolution is more like a scientist setting in motion a series of experiments and letting some end tragically and others bear fruit. I believe in a God who is guiding creation to its goal who has envisaged purposes for his people from before the creation of the world. The Theistic Evolutionary God seems too experimental and since these experiments are with the lives of living creatures more arbitrary and brutal.

Coming from the people who believe God wiped out the dinosaurs with a flood? Where's the compassion there?

Its one of those mysteries of creation but when God saw the wickedness of men in the days of creation he determined to wipe out not only them but all living creatures over which he had given them dominion also. In the end he shows his compassion in Noahs ark to both animals and man and seals his promise to this saved family of creatures with a rainbow. It was to man God brought the animals to be named. It was through the snake that man was tempted to fall.

Race rivalry is bigotry, not natural selection.

Its not that large a jump to think that one race is so much richer , moer powerful and inventive than another because it is 30,000 years ahead in the evolutionary race. That indeed given its supremacy the weaker races should serve it and ultimately give way to it. The essence of Nazi doctrine is such a master race mentality.

If God took 6 days to evolve all life as we see it but left evidence that it really happened over billions of years I would have serious questions as to why he would trick us.

Do we know enough about the universe and the stuff of life to say that evidence does not support a 6 day creation. I am far more agnostic about nature than about God because it seems to be there is far less clarity about creation than about the Divine. I can believe that SN1987a happened and that in a 6000 year creation the fact that it appears 168,000 years old is an optical abberation of some sort. That God did not create the light in transit from a star that never existed.

I don't know where you'll find any tension with TEs here...

Theistic Evolution doesn't take away the truths of the Bible. Humans' unique creation is one of those truths.

Much to your dismay, I'm sure, this is a Christlike compassion. I am trying to deal with the fundamental issues. I'm trying to shed light on the Theory of Evolution for you so that when the day comes that you realize the Bible doesn't have to be a 21st century Science textbook you'll be able to fall back on the Theory of Evolution as truth and not worry about falling into Atheism or Agnosticism.

I do not take the Bible as a scientific text book although there are broad limits that I hope we can all agree it sets.

1) Creation had a beginning
2) Creation was out of nothing
3) Creation was by a being greater and older than what was created.

We start to part company on things like

1) Creation was in 6 days
2) Creation was approximately 6000 years ago.

The reason I can accept the last two points when it comes to modern science is that I believe there are reasonable grounds to doubt sciences efficacy when it comes to questions about the remote regions of the universe (ie just about anything outside our immediate solar system) and also about the distant events of our origins. Science exceeds its remit in these areas and speculates rather than provides definite answers. To be agnostic about the conclusions of science in these areas is the most authentic position I believe that any Christian can hold. I only need to prove grounds for uncertainty to win any argument in these areas. If we do not know then the biblical account could be true so to speak.

 

[gluadys]

These effects relate to magnification I am talking about aberrations, and distortions in what we see. Dark matter for example is a theoretical way of dealing with some of the observed anomalies in the universe - the amounts of mass, observed gravitational distortions etc. Yet apparently dark matter is not that dark as the stars shine uninterrupted though it.

Or they shine through space which is devoid of dark matter. I don't think any theory of dark matter claims it is evenly distributed through space.

So we have a cloud of somethings or various diffferent kinds of clouds of matter that cannot be observed except in terms of its effects and we know very little about it. What effect does this or that kind of dark matter have on mass, energy, light even time.

Actually, I think physicists have answers to all of that. We'll have to see what shernren says.

Obviously dark matter has mass, so it affects the total mass of the universe. And because it has mass it has gravitational effects. In fact, we reason back from the observed gravitational effects to the very existence of dark matter. I expect, in so far as this mass must be accounted for from the beginning, that it also relates to the calculation of time, but I expect that has already been taken into account in the equations which give us the current estimates of the age of the universe. Energy is an aspect of mass as they are interconvertible, so that is already covered. And that leaves light.

In what way do you think dark matter would affect the properties of light that are relevant to the age of the universe or of a star?

If distortions like this are apparent in the universe

What distortions? You keep referring to them, but you do not seem to be able to put a finger on them and tell us about them.

There is so much more to our universe that what we can see and even large parts of the physical universe may in fact be out of phase with the rest of what is observable and yet interactive in some mysterious way with it.

Total speculation.

Seriously, the question I put to you is this: will anything we have not yet observed totally throw off what we have already observed and measured?


We may come up with a totally different theory of why we observe what we do, and why we get the measurements we do, but the observations and measurements themselves do not change.

Ptolemy and Copernicus developed different concepts of the relation of sun and earth. But they both observed eclipses and both were able to predict them with a fair degree of accuracy.

Newton and Einstein both observed and measure the orbital path of Mercury alike, but Einstein was able to come up with a theory that better predicted those measurements. The measurements, the observations, in themselves did not change.

What I am getting at is that future observations, no matter what surprises they hold, do not invalidate past observations. They may suggest, and may suggest very strongly, a new theory to explain those observations, but explaining an observation differently does not change the observation itself.

You seem to be suggesting that the distortions you keep referring to are an effect of what we have not yet observed. But how could what we have not observed change so drastically what we do observe?

We may find a different framework for explaining what we observe, but we do observe what we observe. Even through distortions. After all, distortions themselves are measurable. If we find out that our observation is distorted, identification of the distorting factor will explain why we get the measurement we already get. It will not give us a different measurement.

Even as Voyager makes its lonely way from our sun and its batteries are no longer recharged by solar light from our star it has no way of reportign what it passes through. It becomes more and more unreachable and more and more blind the further it goes. And so it is with mankind also we are blind to the universes mysteries yet speak with too much confidence about them.

But this whole conversation is not about mysteries we are blind to, but about what we do see.

I have yet to see any argument that would provide a basis for thinking what we don't know invalidates what we do know.

Sure, there is lots more to discover. And some of it will place what we know in a new frame of reference. But none of it will take away the knowledge we already have of geology, biology, physics and chemistry as we now know them.

That is like saying that because a five-year old does not comprehend trigonometry or calculus, s/he cannot trust simple addition and subtraction.

What all this rambling rhapsody to unknown mysteries amounts to is an extended argument in favor of god-of-the-gaps.

Please ponder carefully the Bonhoeffer quote in my signature.

Our maths is bunk

It has been obvious for some time that rejecting evolution inevitably leads to rejecting all of science. Now it leads to rejecting math as well.

since it is based on assumptions of universal laws drawn from a single solar system,

Are you seriously suggesting that we cannot trust measurements of anything more than four lightyears away? That the position of Alpha Centauri is the limit of reliable calculation?

How does trigonometry fail us at this boundary? How does spectrometry fail us beyond this range? Is every star in the sky an illusion?

Why, if none of our observations are reliable outside of our solar system, do they work together so well?

since it fails to quantify and explain the effects of the unobservable realms of our universe.

Of course, it does. One cannot quantify anything not observed. (Taking "observation" in a broad sense. We have not seen dark matter, but we have observed gravitational effects which we currently attribute to dark matter. We can and do quantify those gravitational effects.)

What you have to show to sustain your case is that observations already made can be invalidated by those not yet made. Note that I am not talking about theory here. We may invalidate the concept of dark matter by which we currently explain those gravitational effects. But that does not cancel them out. Those observations still exist and if we drop the concept of dark matter it will be because we have a better explanation of the observations. Not because the observations themselves are incorrect or our measurements are wrong.

So your calculations collapse and you can no longer explain life if even one variable changes.

No, it is a habitable universe that collapses.

You and your friends did not have information about the uttermost reaches of space and time to do the maths in the first place!

All math is applied to the information we do have. It is not what is unobserved that is the problem. It is your desire to deny what we have observed. You cannot show that any unobserved mystery will change any repeatedly verified observation we have made. The reality we do not know yet contains the reality we do know, and the reality we do know will remain what it is as we discover more of it.

So appeal to the unknown is simply handwaving away the real problems you have with what we do know.

 

[gluadys]

Whose to say where the physical centre of the universe is?

Actually, since the universe is unbounded, there is no physical centre.

Its one of those mysteries of creation but when God saw the wickedness of men in the days of creation he determined to wipe out not only them but all living creatures over which he had given them dominion also.

I, too, find it very strange that you can accept this as a "mystery" while denouncing evolution as "brutality".

Its not that large a jump to think that one race is so much richer , moer powerful and inventive than another because it is 30,000 years ahead in the evolutionary race.

But there is no evolutionary race to be ahead in.

Do we know enough about the universe and the stuff of life to say that evidence does not support a 6 day creation.

Yes.

I can believe that SN1987a happened and that in a 6000 year creation the fact that it appears 168,000 years old is an optical abberation of some sort.

You believe it because you need to believe it in light of your other beliefs which contradict real experience. This is pure ad hoc conjecture served up to support wishful thinking in denial of God's actual handiwork.

1) Creation had a beginning
2) Creation was out of nothing
3) Creation was by a being greater and older than what was created.

I would not accept "older" in 3). As an eternal Being, God does not have age.

The reason I can accept the last two points when it comes to modern science is that I believe there are reasonable grounds to doubt sciences efficacy when it comes to questions about the remote regions of the universe (ie just about anything outside our immediate solar system) and also about the distant events of our origins.

And those reasonable grounds are.....?

 

[mindlight]

The computer I am typing on right now is an assembly of plastic, silicon, metal, and other things. All of them were probably assembled from raw materials mined thousands of kilometers away or more, probably on entirely different continents. They had to travel by ship, or land, or air, to factories where over a short floor space of meters they were processed into individual parts, and then further transported to another factory where the parts were assembled into a complete computer.

For thousands, if not millions, of kilometers in space, the parts that make up my computer did not actually make up a computer. And now my computer only occupies less than half a meter of space. That does not make it meaningless; certainly not to me!

So just because the particles that make up the physical body of me have traveled for billions of years in time, before making up my body for a few years (scientists guess that the entire body is cellularly renewed every seven years, very roughly), why should I feel any less significant for it?

The parts of something as silly as a computer are allowed to travel through millions of kilometers in space without being a computer without affecting how much my computer means to me, bound in space and time;
so why shouldn't the parts of me be allowed to travel through billions of years in time without being me without affecting my significance to God, who is not even bound by time?

I get your point - it just seems an incredibly wasteful way to consider the emergence of life. In the end Adam was formed from the dust of the earth and fashioned into the creature that he is. Then God breathed life into him. I suppose you could say all those retard neanderthals and cromagnons were all moments in the process but that it was not until homosapiens that God breathed life into mankind and the special spark of the divine that distinguishes man from beast was ignited. I get your point its a matter of perspective in the end I suppose but either way man as we see him today has to be a special creation and uniquely amongst Gods creatures models the divine to his creation.

If there is a bull in the china shop, then show me the pieces.

Theories made of mere china should not be allowed to stand. If the bull were not real we would have to invent him in the name of auhenticity to smash what could not survive the test of an unexplored reality.

If there really are fundamental distortions in nature that affect the way everything works, where is the chaos? Where are the millions of observations that don't make sense?

A consistent picture can be a false one as anyone who lived under communism could tell you. The rebels got snipperts of the truth but few could piece it together into a coherent argument. Many did not know why they were fighting and dying. It was embedded in them that they had right to freedom and to worship and to truth even though everything they were fed denied this to them. Dark matter is a provisional concept designed to explain just the kinds of gravitational distortions that are so hard to explain in the modern paradigm and which call it into question. But has anyone ever observed dark matter except by its effects? No - so is it real or just a model for trying to explain exactly the kinds of optical abberrations I am trying to articulate. The view is that the vast bulk of mass in the universe is unobserable and does not interact with the electromagnetic radiation in any observable kind of way. Since the bulk of observations about the universe are made on the basis of the observable effects of electromagnetic activity this is a major downer on the view that modern science can speak with much certainty about the universe beyond our small corner of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Here's a simple experiment for you. Take a piece of paper and mark a point on it. Mark another point on it. You can always draw a line between two points. Now, randomly mark a third point on it. Can you draw a line through those three points? Mark a fourth point, again randomly. Can a line go through those four points? Mark two more points. Does it even look like a line might explain those six points any more? Mark four more points. If I looked at those ten points, would I think there was any rhyme and reason to how they were placed?

Hey I can believe in curved lines and multi dimensional models even if I do not instinctively think with them. Gods thoughts are so much higher than our own.

I hope the point is clear: random errors do not yield useable correlations; non-random errors are governed by deeper physical principles by definition. Either way, a useable correlation shows something. I hope you notice by now how I am the one always presenting physical evidence, always showing examples, always explaining physical principles, always explaining my reasoning. You, on the other hand, have no evidence to show for your assertions; no points off the lines.

So explain how dark matter interacts with light and energy and normal mass and time. I only need to prove reasonable grounds for doubt in the certainty of modern physics conclusions.

If the entire universe really is off-kilter, why isn't there anything to show for it? After all, you are trying to tell me that the observable patterns in nature cannot possibly be operational across deep time, without showing me any observed deviation from those patterns.

I do not believe that SN1987a is 168000 years old. So there is a distortion in the way it is being observed. There are reasonable grounds to doubt science based on the view that the methods they use cannot verify the conclusions they draw about such phenomena. If there are distortions in our observations of the stars then like a prism refracting light they may en masse distortions revealing consistent but false conclusions to us in our observations of the universe.

If I told you "All swans are white", you would be able to show me where that pattern failed by showing me a black swan. If I give you a pattern, you should expect to destroy that pattern by showing me an instance where it doesn't apply, a point off the line, a china cup shattered on the floor. Why can't you find any?

Or does the invisible bull clean up behind itself and miraculously produce new china pieces that replace the old ones it broke?

I would not have to show you a black swan only prove to you that you could not know if you had the full sample of swans to draw your conclusion from. Your conclusion remains a hypothesis until you have searched every nook and cranny for a black swan. Since it is not possible for you to do that you cannot even say to me all swans are white - you simply do not know.

The exception is not the only way to cast doubt upon the rule. If I lived on an island inhabited only by white swans I might believe as you do. But if I were to be transported to another island inhabited only by black swans then I would know that however well meaning you had been deceived. Since modern physicists have experience only of white swan island their theories on the universe lack cosmic credibility, there may well be black swans or pieces of broken china out there and neither you nor I can say either way with any certainty.

 

[gluadys]

I can believe that SN1987a happened and that in a 6000 year creation the fact that it appears 168,000 years old is an optical abberation of some sort.

I
I do not believe that SN1987a is 168000 years old. So there is a distortion in the way it is being observed.

What I hear you saying is that because you believe SN1987a cannot be 168,000 years old, there must be some sort of optical aberration (or equivalent) distorting this measurement. Or more precisely, you have to believe that such a distortion exists.

After all, neither the universe nor its Creator has any obligation to cater to what you believe about it.

Should one not rather base one's beliefs on what is rather than demand that reality conform to one's beliefs?

But let us go a little deeper.

You begin with the belief that the universe is no more than 6,000 years old.

You know that our observations say it is much older. You do not quarrel with the science that produced the observations. You are not saying that the scientists are lying or pulling numbers out of a hat. You are not even suggesting there is something wrong with our technology.

In short, you are agreeing that there is a genuine discrepancy between reliably repeated observations and your belief.

You do not propose any distortion or aberration because of any evidence that the science is shaky. You posit it only because your belief will not allow you to accept the science.

This is, in the first place, circular reasoning. You attribute some distortion to reality in order to shore up the belief that requires the distortion in the first place.

Now let us go deeper.

You believe in a young universe. Why? I am sure you would say "because scripture says so."

But that is not truly the case. Scripture "says so" only on the assumption that the scripture is a particular genre of literature to be interpreted by a particular hermeneutic principle.

Does scripture label the literary genres it is written in? No. That is something human interpreters of scripture do. Does scripture set out within itself the proper hermeneutical principles for its interpretation? No, this again is something human interpreters do.

You are kidding yourself if you say you believe in a young earth because this is what God revealed.

In fact, you actually believe God revealed a young earth because of a prior commitment to a specific hermeneutic that is not revealed, but invented by human interpreters.

So when we get back to the supernova, you are now positing an undetected observational aberration because you have committed yourself to a particular human doctrine on how to read scripture. It is only because of this prior commitment that you came to believe scripture reveals a young earth.

Now lets go still deeper. Why does this particular hermeneutic appeal to you?

I am blowing my own horn a bit, but I believe it is because you are an heir of the Enlightenment, when older worldviews were replaced by the empirical worldview of modern times. (See the thread Worldviews and Interpretations of Scripture). To cite myself:

The successes of the scientific method led to a wide-spread conviction that reality is equivalent to what can be described scientifically i.e. reality is empirical.

Applied to scripture, this implies that scripture is to be interpreted as an objective description of empirical events such as would have been made by a third phase observer and reporter. Allowances can be made for naïve realism e.g. the sun is described as rising because that is what it appears to do. Allowances can also be made for poetic use of figurative language, and for parables and analogies when so stated. But where such factors are not evident, the text is to be understood as empirical description.
​

The hermeneutic you are using is an invention of modern times which tries to turn a spiritual text into a science text.

But when actual scientific observations disagree with the text, you are placed in a quandary.

But the quandary is not a fault of either the bible or of nature or of science. It is a quandary of human making.

Your fundamental belief here is in scientism: the exaltation of science as the only mode of knowing truth. The idea that God himself, through scripture, reveals a young earth depends on the application of scientism to the interpretation of scripture.

Drop the scientism, and the false need to believe in this so-called revelation disappears, and with it the need to deny the reliability of science.

 

[Scotishfury09]

Whose to say where the physical centre of the universe is? Of course the earth goes round the sun.

Does that really have any bearing to the truth behind the point I made?

I would still believe in God if the universe were old. Macro-evolution is harder to accept but if God had done it like that I would accept that also as I did when I was a younger Christian. I simply do not believe that the God I see in scripture acts in such an indiscriminate and brutal manner.

Gluadys just made a thread about the literary approach to the Bible's formation in which she mention that Marcion wanted to completely get rid of the Old Testament because he believed the God of the Hebrews and the God of Jesus Christ could, in no way, be the same deity. God's pretty brutal in the OT. I don't see it as God's brutality as much as I see the human element in the Scriptures. Humanistic perceptions of a fully indescribable God tend to be a little skewed.

Sovereignty of God if one believes in Theistic evolution is more like a scientist setting in motion a series of experiments and letting some end tragically and others bear fruit. I believe in a God who is guiding creation to its goal who has envisaged purposes for his people from before the creation of the world. The Theistic Evolutionary God seems too experimental and since these experiments are with the lives of living creatures more arbitrary and brutal.

Using your own analogy, I could say that the very same type of experiment was done by "your God". The experiment turned awry at the fall and ultimately ends for a large number of people suffering eternal damnation. Some end tragically (go to hell) and others bear fruit (go to heaven).

Its one of those mysteries of creation but when God saw the wickedness of men in the days of creation he determined to wipe out not only them but all living creatures over which he had given them dominion also. In the end he shows his compassion in Noahs ark to both animals and man and seals his promise to this saved family of creatures with a rainbow. It was to man God brought the animals to be named. It was through the snake that man was tempted to fall.

Tell me, did the flood change anything about salvation? Every human, aside from Jesus, is, was and shall be a sinner. Why would a compassionate God wipe out a sinful world only to have it be filled with more sinners? If the flood had never happened, would we still need the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Yes, absolutely. Then why destroy so much of God's creation for nothing? If that is not the epitome of brutality, I don't know what is.

Its not that large a jump to think that one race is so much richer , moer powerful and inventive than another because it is 30,000 years ahead in the evolutionary race. That indeed given its supremacy the weaker races should serve it and ultimately give way to it. The essence of Nazi doctrine is such a master race mentality.

What does 30,000 years have to do with natural selection? How old do you think the cockroach is?

Have you ever read Mein Kampf? Let me give you an excerpt:

The fox remains always a fox, the goose remains a goose, and the tiger will retain the character of a tiger.
Chapter 11, p. 285 of my copy.

Does this sound like he's a staunch supporter of the Theory of Evolution? I believe Hitler was screwed up, but he wasn't screwed up because of his views of TOE. Stop tying Nazis to evolution.

Do we know enough about the universe and the stuff of life to say that evidence does not support a 6 day creation. I am far more agnostic about nature than about God because it seems to be there is far less clarity about creation than about the Divine. I can believe that SN1987a happened and that in a 6000 year creation the fact that it appears 168,000 years old is an optical abberation of some sort. That God did not create the light in transit from a star that never existed.

No, you think there is less clarity about creation. You're so tightly wrapped up in postmodernity that you can't tell whether the cardinal directions can be believed or not.

Where does your skepticism end? Can you name any -ology's that you can rely on?

I do not take the Bible as a scientific text book although there are broad limits that I hope we can all agree it sets.

1) Creation had a beginning
2) Creation was out of nothing
3) Creation was by a being greater and older than what was created.

I agree with gluadys, God is ageless.

We start to part company on things like

1) Creation was in 6 days
2) Creation was approximately 6000 years ago.

The reason I can accept the last two points when it comes to modern science is that I believe there are reasonable grounds to doubt sciences efficacy when it comes to questions about the remote regions of the universe (ie just about anything outside our immediate solar system) and also about the distant events of our origins. Science exceeds its remit in these areas and speculates rather than provides definite answers. To be agnostic about the conclusions of science in these areas is the most authentic position I believe that any Christian can hold. I only need to prove grounds for uncertainty to win any argument in these areas. If we do not know then the biblical account could be true so to speak.

You can't trust any observations made just outside our solar system? Dadgummit, Voyager 1, why do you deceive us?! You've crossed the final frontiers of space never to relay any dependable evidence ever again.

You just told me you don't read the Bible as a science textbook but claim that any science outside the Bible is unreliable. Can you trust the builders that built the house you're living in? I'm betting they have at least the most rudimentary training in some aspect of secular science.

 

[mindlight]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

What I hear you saying is that because you believe SN1987a cannot be 168,000 years old, there must be some sort of optical aberration (or equivalent) distorting this
measurement. Or more precisely, you have to believe that such a distortion exists.

I am convinced that the Bible text says one thing but I respect that the argument for the age of SN1987as age is a consistent but not wholly conclusive one. This is not really a
paradox since I do not value observations and deductions from nature as highly as those from scripture. The bible says this so I am sceptical about the ultimate validity of that.

After all, neither the universe nor its Creator has any obligation to cater to what you believe about it.

I am trying to be true to what the Creator Himself has said about His creation. The universe is what it is and I happen to believe that noone has a full handle on what that is
except its Creator.

Should one not rather base one's beliefs on what is rather than demand that reality conform to one's beliefs?

What is is disputable in the case of the uttermost reaches of the universe and the dimly recalled history of time.

But let us go a little deeper.

Please do!

You begin with the belief that the universe is no more than 6,000 years old.

OK

You know that our observations say it is much older. You do not quarrel with the science that produced the observations. You are not saying that the scientists are lying or
pulling numbers out of a hat. You are not even suggesting there is something wrong with our technology.

All true

In short, you are agreeing that there is a genuine discrepancy between reliably repeated observations and your belief.

No problem so far

You do not propose any distortion or aberration because of any evidence that the science is shaky.

The evidence is that there is no reliable evidence that can be tested in the same ways that we could test stuff in earth science. There are too many variables and there are too
many things that we do not know.

You posit it only because your belief will not allow you to accept the science. This is, in the first place, circular reasoning. You attribute some distortion to reality
in order to shore up the belief that requires the distortion in the first place.

So no - I believe science has spoken too confidently about things it cannot know AND because these conclusions appear to contradict what I and most Jews and Christians for the
last 3000 years have believed scripture says. faith is being certain of things we cannot see.

Now let us go deeper.
You believe in a young universe. Why? I am sure you would say "because scripture says so."
But that is not truly the case. Scripture "says so" only on the assumption that the scripture is a particular genre of literature to be interpreted by a particular hermeneutic
principle.

By that you mean the genre the author intended and the hermeneutic that has been consistently used for most the last 3000 years.

Does scripture label the literary genres it is written in? No. That is something human interpreters of scripture do. Does scripture set out within itself the proper
hermeneutical principles for its interpretation? No, this again is something human interpreters do.

Does it need labels when the whole genre of Genesis is written in a literal historical style and has always been so. Jesus affirms this is an historical style when he quotes from
events in Genesis.

You are kidding yourself if you say you believe in a young earth because this is what God revealed.
In fact, you actually believe God revealed a young earth because of a prior commitment to a specific hermeneutic that is not revealed, but invented by human interpreters.

The Jewish calendar dating from creation and the historical views of all the main Christian denominations were for the view I hold. The recent change to Catholic thinking for
example is something I attribute to an overly high valuation of the credibility of the scientific method when it comes to questions of these sorts.

So when we get back to the supernova, you are now positing an undetected observational aberration because you have committed yourself to a particular human doctrine on how
to read scripture. It is only because of this prior commitment that you came to believe scripture reveals a young earth.

The position of scepticism I hold is for a variety of reasons including my belief that a 168,000 year old star is an impossibility in a 6,000 year old universe.

Now lets go still deeper. Why does this particular hermeneutic appeal to you?
I am blowing my own horn a bit, but I believe it is because you are an heir of the Enlightenment, when older worldviews were replaced by the empirical worldview of modern times.
(See the thread Worldviews and Interpretations of Scripture). To cite myself:
The successes of the scientific method led to a wide-spread conviction that reality is equivalent to what can be described scientifically i.e. reality is empirical.
Applied to scripture, this implies that scripture is to be interpreted as an objective description of empirical events such as would have been made by a third phase observer and
reporter. Allowances can be made for naïve realism e.g. the sun is described as rising because that is what it appears to do. Allowances can also be made for poetic use of
figurative language, and for parables and analogies when so stated. But where such factors are not evident, the text is to be understood as empirical description.
The hermeneutic you are using is an invention of modern times which tries to turn a spiritual text into a science text.

The method I use predates science as it is today and in the case of SN1987a contradicts its broadly accepted conclusions. The scriptures do of course speak on a great many more levels but the debate in this forum is about that overlap between science and scripture. If scripture says a literal historical thing like the universe has a beginning then yes I accept that sets a limit to what scientists can say about the universe. If scripture says that God did it in 6 days 6000 years ago that poses a problem to those who say he did it over 13 billion years.

But when actual scientific observations disagree with the text, you are placed in a quandary.
But the quandary is not a fault of either the bible or of nature or of science. It is a quandary of human making.
Your fundamental belief here is in scientism: the exaltation of science as the only mode of knowing truth. The idea that God himself, through scripture, reveals a young earth
depends on the application of scientism to the interpretation of scripture.
Drop the scientism, and the false need to believe in this so-called revelation disappears, and with it the need to deny the reliability of science.

Interesting argument but no I disagree and I am in no quandry because of the valuation I place on the natural world vis a vis scripture. The one is flawed , the other not.

 

[mindlight]

Gluadys just made a thread about the literary approach to the Bible's formation in which she mention that Marcion wanted to completely get rid of the Old Testament because
he believed the God of the Hebrews and the God of Jesus Christ could, in no way, be the same deity. God's pretty brutal in the OT. I don't see it as God's brutality as much as I
see the human element in the Scriptures. Humanistic perceptions of a fully indescribable God tend to be a little skewed.

Before and after Christ comes back in glory the judgments of God will be all the more spectacular. I can accept the judgments of the Old testament God as being in accord with
New Testament. The terrible consequence of sin is what is altoften forgotten by the humanistic mindsets of modern interpreters. Sin warrants the extinction of all life as we
know it. Yet in Noah and in the life of Christ we see Gods mercy at work saving us from the savage consequence of sin.
By contrast the evolutionary process takes place largely before the existence of a moral man able to make moral choices. Thus the pain and death in it have no justification in
terms of judgment and of justice. They appear as merely a horrible and meaningless tale of endless suffering with no apparent justification at all.

Using your own analogy, I could say that the very same type of experiment was done by "your God". The experiment turned awry at the fall and ultimately ends for a large
number of people suffering eternal damnation. Some end tragically (go to hell) and others bear fruit (go to heaven).

Quote:
Its one of those mysteries of creation but when God saw the wickedness of men in the days of creation he determined to wipe out not only them but all living creatures over which
he had given them dominion also. In the end he shows his compassion in Noahs ark to both animals and man and seals his promise to this saved family of creatures with a rainbow. It
was to man God brought the animals to be named. It was through the snake that man was tempted to fall.

Tell me, did the flood change anything about salvation? Every human, aside from Jesus, is, was and shall be a sinner. Why would a compassionate God wipe out a sinful world
only to have it be filled with more sinners? If the flood had never happened, would we still need the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Yes, absolutely. Then why destroy so much of God's
creation for nothing? If that is not the epitome of brutality, I don't know what is.

Scary stuff I agree but this is the God of the Bible - if you reject him, or as the generation before the flood appeared to do just ignore Him and live your life as if he were not
there then you risk total obliteration with hell to follow.

No, you think there is less clarity about creation. You're so tightly wrapped up in postmodernity that you can't tell whether the cardinal directions can be believed or
not.
Where does your skepticism end? Can you name any -ology's that you can rely on?

I accept most of the practical models of terrestrial science - its when they start speculating on origins and the uttermost regions of the universe that we part company.

I agree with gluadys, God is ageless.

No big disagreement here

The reason I can accept the last two points when it comes to modern science is that I believe there are reasonable grounds to doubt sciences efficacy when it comes to questions
about the remote regions of the universe (ie just about anything outside our immediate solar system) and also about the distant events of our origins. Science exceeds its remit in
these areas and speculates rather than provides definite answers. To be agnostic about the conclusions of science in these areas is the most authentic position I believe that any
Christian can hold. I only need to prove grounds for uncertainty to win any argument in these areas. If we do not know then the biblical account could be true so to speak.

You can't trust any observations made just outside our solar system? Dadgummit, Voyager 1, why do you deceive us?! You've crossed the final frontiers of space never to
relay any dependable evidence ever again.

Maybe one day people will recover this fantastic tool of science but until then its batteries are probably getting flat now and it has not got the charge to relay a message back
to us or even to make measurements of its surroundings.

You just told me you don't read the Bible as a science textbook but claim that any science outside the Bible is unreliable. Can you trust the builders that built the house
you're living in? I'm betting they have at least the most rudimentary training in some aspect of secular science.

You are missing the point on this and in practical terms I have little argument with terrestrial and practical science.

 

[gluadys]

I am trying to be true to what the Creator Himself has said about His creation.

But the source of your understanding of what the Creator has said derives from the spin you give to the text of scripture.

The evidence is that there is no reliable evidence that can be tested in the same ways that we could test stuff in earth science. There are too many variables and there are too
many things that we do not know.

Variables can be identified and measured. We can know to what extent variables prevent us from getting an accurate answer. We can know whether a measurement is more than 30% off or less than 3% off. You overestimate what we do not know.

So no - I believe science has spoken too confidently about things it cannot know AND because these conclusions appear to contradict what I and most Jews and Christians for the
last 3000 years have believed scripture says.

Actually, given population growth curves, most Jews and Christians are probably alive today and do not agree that this is what scripture says. Furthermore, as has been shown repeatedly, many Jews and Christians well before the modern era held that the chronology of Genesis 1 was not literal.

faith is being certain of things we cannot see.

But you are adding the unnecessary corollory that we must be uncertain of things we can see.

By that you mean the genre the author intended and the hermeneutic that has been consistently used for most the last 3000 years.

Actually, the hermeneutic you are using is modern and was only developed in modern times. The particular arguments you are using are post-1950.

Does it need labels when the whole genre of Genesis is written in a literal historical style and has always been so. Jesus affirms this is an historical style when he quotes from
events in Genesis.

The identification of the literary genre of Genesis as "literal historical style" is an outcome of the hermeneutic you have put your faith in. Only those who have a modern faith in the empiricism of scripture adopt the mantra that Genesis is written as literal history. Citations from Genesis by Jesus or anyone else do not confirm this genre unless you can show that the person citing the passage also adopted the same hermeneutic.

The Jewish calendar dating from creation and the historical views of all the main Christian denominations were for the view I hold.

The Jewish calendar is a late invention of the rabbis. It shows nothing more than a rabbinic tradition developed in the inter-testamental period.

The position of scepticism I hold is for a variety of reasons including my belief that a 168,000 year old star is an impossibility in a 6,000 year old universe.

Actually, this is the sole reason for your scepticism. You have not named a single other reason.

If scripture says a literal historical thing like the universe has a beginning then yes I accept that sets a limit to what scientists can say about the universe. If scripture says that God did it in 6 days 6000 years ago that poses a problem to those who say he did it over 13 billion years.

The key term in both cases being "If". I deny the premise that scripture is speaking in a literal historical genre.

The reason I can accept the last two points when it comes to modern science is that I believe there are reasonable grounds to doubt sciences efficacy when it comes to questions
about the remote regions of the universe (ie just about anything outside our immediate solar system) and also about the distant events of our origins.

You do well to say you believe in these reasonable grounds. You have never identified them and I do not believe you can. Because, in fact, those "reasonable grounds" do not exist. Your sole basis for scepticism is your prior commitment to a hermeneutic that forces a "revelation" of a young earth.

But since you are also committed to scientism, you must also posit unspecified and unidentifiable "reasonable grounds" for scepticism.

This is not genuine scepticism. This is a yearning desire for reasonable grounds to exist so that you can convince yourself that your faith in a literal hermeneutic is well grounded.

You do not have reasonable grounds. You believe reasonable grounds ought to exist, must exist, but you have none to show us.