Calminian said:
Ah, but you know for certain what a miraculous earth would look like.
Nope. I merely know that it seems a little odd for it to have all these extra bits of pre-history built into it. Why?
Assuming no miracles have happened. Funny how you keep leaving this out.
Not at all! This is how we draw any useful conclusions at all. Otherwise, why use antibiotics? It may seem to the casual observer that penicillin is killing bacteria, but how do we know God is not miraculously killing the bacteria?
In short, if we wish to learn anything about the structure of Creation, we must assume that God is not actively intervening all the time.
No it was not created old, no more than the wine was created old.
Okay. It was created with traits (such as tree rings) that are associated with age in the normal scheme of things, but which aren't in the case of miracles.
It only looks old to you because you don't believe the record that's telling you it's young (relatively). You're believing scientific dating methods that assume no miracles. Yet the record tells us miracles have happenedincredible large scale miracles.
Sure. But... It's not just that there's miracles. It's that they are followed by a miraculous coverup! If there was a Flood, not only was there a Flood, but after the Flood, God carefully hid all the evidence, miraculously moving things around and changing them.
In other words... If you look at what any normal flood leaves for evidence, you learn that floods leave certain kinds of evidence. The global Flood, if it happened, left
absolutely no evidence at all.
This requires a second miracle, not described in the Bible.
Well, you might want to let God tell you. He did give you a historical record.
Says who?
It is not an article of my faith that the Old Testament is "a historical record", least of all the book of Genesis, which is structured very much like a creation myth, and indeed, is similar structurally to the creation myths of other cultures, but adapted in ways that highlight the differences of Hebrew beliefs.
But in that case you know what the irregularities are, because you know what the regularities are. We dont have multiple universes that have been naturally formed to compare ours to, that we might determine which ones are regular and irregular. Everything we have to observe is ultimately from a supernatural act.
This may be, but nonetheless... If I am confronted with a petrified tree, I can tell you how many years it lived, and identify patterns that indicate, say, when there were good years, and when there were bad years, and even fires.
And if you show me three trees, I show you whether or not they lived at overlapping times, and if so, how long the time from the oldest to the youngest was.
And this works in most cases, except that, around 6,000 years back, the rings are all manufactured by supernatural influence. Nonetheless, they continue to show the patterns of abundance and scarcity, and fire, going back thousands of years further. For reasons of His own, apparently, God created fossilized trees that have rings showing a pattern of abundance and scarcity happening before the world was even created.
This is rather interesting. Why?
But it doesnt look billions of years old. Its only assumed to be old by those that deny a miracle was involved in its existence.
This, I think, is where we disagree. We have mechanisms available to let us compare one thing to another and develop reasonable predictions about their ages; for instance, tree rings.
You wouldn't argue with me if I showed you a cross-section of a huge, old, tree and told you it was seven hundred years old. And if I showed you a fossilized tree, from the same area, with a hundred or more years of rings in similar patterns, you would probably grant that the fossilized tree was older, and that the old tree was there during the years they have in common.
So, things can "look old". Strictly speaking, though, this is not just assuming "no miracles". It is assuming that the miracles are not covered up.
If, around 6,000 years back, all the tree rings were perfectly regular, and there were no dead trees over 6,000 years old, we would have a very good argument for believing that the world was created 6,000 years ago, with trees springing from the ground in a single day.
Indeed many scientists believe matter in infinite. Do you believe its infinite or that it just looks infinite?
I have no opinion on the question.
I think he wants you to study His Word and trust it. As you know, scientific theories will come and go.
The Bible is not the Word. It is a book. The Word is Jesus, and none other. To call the Bible the Word is to flirt with the edges of bibliolatry.
By this logic, you then must also believe that God wanted practically all theologians to be deceived before the age of scientific enlightenment. For that is indeed what happened if you are correct.
I theorize that God doesn't really care how old we think the universe is, except insofar as it prevents us from loving our neighbor.
I always marvel how concerned some are that YEC interpretations make God a deceiver because it contradicts modern scientific theories that assume naturalism. Yet they have no problem with the text misleading theologians for centuries.
I don't think the text misled people. After all, Augustine and Origen both understood it as parable. So far as I can tell, theologians are sometimes in the habit of trying to extract simple answers from hard ones, and in this, they deceive themselves.
No No No!
