Can you believe in YEC and still be a scientist?

Kristos

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I thought it might be interesting to turn this around a look at it from another direction.

Is it possible to be a scientist (or scientific if you wish) and believe that the earth was created according the a literal timeline based on Genesis ie in 6 days around 6000 years?

What would your theory be based on? What data? What observation? How would you account for geological observations that indicate the earth is very old? Fossil remains that indicate that millions of species lived a very long time ago? Magnetic data that indicates that earth magnetic field is very old? etc, etc...

Is there any way to coherently, and scientifically fold this all into YEC?
 

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I do know some people who are scientists who believe in a literal 6-day creation. (And I'm not speaking of "creation scientists" in this group ... I'd rather just not consider them at all.) To be honest, I am always surprised when I learn this is the belief they hold. I first met such people when I was deeply entrenched in the necessity of accepting all popular scientific belief.

I have not taken the opportunity to speak with them deeply about how they reconcile such things. The timing of the conversation and my own beliefs at that time and opportunity to converse never seemed to fit together. So I cannot explain how they reconcile such things. But they are indeed "true scientists" working in the field, and they did indeed embrace a belief in Creation. (I should qualify - it was usually evolution that was under discussion, and not necessarily YEC ... I can only offhand verify one that specifically embraced YEC.)

I'm not speaking for the Church - and it still isn't something I look deeply into. I really have personal spiritual goals that overshadow any concerns about either origins or anything to do with specifics of the afterlife. It seems evolution and tollhouses inspire the most spirited discussion, and I rarely participate in either.

But ... it seems to me that understand CREATION by God is important. Evolution of species is something that comes sharply in tension with this - while I know some have found ways to believe both, it is more difficult. On the other hand, the age of the universe itself - is much less a problem when considering this. As I said, I'm not speaking for the Church, but ... it really sounds in a plain reading of Genesis that some mass existed in space before we get the descriptions of what is going on. God says "Let there be light" ... true ... but there is mention of waters that the Spirit of God hovers over. How they came to be is not mentioned. And when land is separated from water - how it came into being is not explained.

I see no need to be dogmatic that the very rocks that form the earth itself, and other matter in the universe, are only 6,000 years old.

It seems there are three major points of belief along a continuum. YEC might be found at one extreme end, popular scientific theory that embraces everything to do with evolution and geology might be found at the other end, and even a very literal interpretation of Genesis seems to possibly fall in between.

Then again, I have no special training in geology, astronomy, etc. I can do no more than accept what I am told where most of it is concerned. I do think that some of the ideas can be wrong - how often in the past have "modern" scientific beliefs been found to be wrong? But just as easily, perhaps they will be correct. It really matters not much to me.

It is my experience in biological sciences that led to my conviction that the popular theories cannot be correct as they are currently advanced, and to have some issue with the basis on which they are built. But that does not necessitate YEC to me, and in fact, I'm not very inclined toward it.
 
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KWCrazy

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Can you be a scientist and believe in the Bible as written? Absolutely. Science is the study of the natural world around us. The Bible reveals the actions of a supernatural Creator unbound by the laws of science. The two are not mutually exclusive. As a scientist, one need not buy into the same beliefs that others have; that the world is billions of years old; that all living things evolved from some magic Frankencell; that increasing complexity, while never observed, is the dominant force of biology. Science is the study of what is. The study of origination has no impact on what is because anything which cannot be directly observed is speculation anyway. Did man and chimps have a common ancestor? Some think they did, the Bible teaches that they did not. They had a common Creator and share the same world; comprised of the same chemicals and living in similar environmental conditions. As far as ancestry goes, nobody is bound by any requirement to believe the theories of man over the word of God. It may be, perhaps, harder for a scientist to believe that God has dominion over the laws of physics, but that's what makes faith hard. If it were easy, all would believe.
 
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nikolaj

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Imagine if you went to your doctor and he asked you 'when did you have your last confession'. That would be a case for ethics committee. Unfortunately, somebody is convincing everybody that science and religion are against each other. People got confused very easily. Most of us are somewhere in the middle of course, but there are fundamentalists as well, particularly on the atheist side.
By the way the Hebrew word 'yom' - translates as 'day', but it can also mean unlimited time period. In world creation this can be understood as an epoch
 
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jckstraw72

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its rather irrelevant, as the pre-fallen world is not open to investigation by science or philosophy, whether creationist or evolutionist. the idea that it is is already an assumption.
 
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gzt

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Except such a break would leave some evidence. At the very least, one would be surprised that the methods working up until that break continued working as if there weren't one. These are assumptions, but testable ones, and your theory provides almost no accounting for the observations, it only handwaves them away. That is eminently unsatisfying.
 
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michaeldimmickjr

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There is a false dichotomy in our society between God and science. All truth points to God. There is however another issue at hand and that is "truth" that masquerades as science, pseudo-science if you will is the prevailing norm. Theory has replaced true scientific method. People prostrate themselves before the modern "scientists" and take what they say for gospel truth. It's a sad state of affairs indeed.
 
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rusmeister

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its rather irrelevant, as the pre-fallen world is not open to investigation by science or philosophy, whether creationist or evolutionist. the idea that it is is already an assumption.
Except such a break would leave some evidence. At the very least, one would be surprised that the methods working up until that break continued working as if there weren't one. These are assumptions, but testable ones, and your theory provides almost no accounting for the observations, it only handwaves them away. That is eminently unsatisfying.
This is the problem. Evidence HAS been left, but not the kind that the tools of the natural sciences can possibly examine. All of your science is built on observations of the Fallen world, gz. You can't take the assumptions and laws developed in observation of a post-Fallen world and apply them to a world before the Fall. That is a philosophical failure, even within the distinct philosophy of science.

The evidence is the sort CS Lewis discusses in "Mere Christianity" and "The Screwtape Letters", what Chesterton talks about in "Orthodoxy". Things such as our desire for justice, of a sense of a moral law both known and broken. It IS evidence, but it is not in the realm of physics, biology, geology and so on.

You HAVE to "handwave away" an impossibility. There is no choice. You have to handwave away time travel, and human asexual reproduction, because they are products of the imagination that science cannot reproduce. And since we can only observe life as it has been ordered since the Fall, it is necessarily imaginative, however true, and even rational our knowledge, such as it is, to try to extend our scientific knowledge into a world before the Fall.

We ARE unsatisfied. The Fall ensured that we cannot be satisfied. All of our observations, all of our ability to think and reason, has limits. In this TF is certainly right; there are things we cannot know. (That we CAN know some things certainly is another matter.)
 
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ArmyMatt

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I wouldn't call a DDS a scientist. But I do know actual scientists who are 6-day YEC. Again, they typically don't work in anything that does anything diachronically.

I am pretty sure the dental and medical fields would fall under the sciences, especially since medicine was brought up in the other thread
 
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Wryetui

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Can you really know the age of the earth? Can, either YEC or OEC, evolutionists or creationists really know the age of the earth? In my opinion this is a matter of faith, you cannot know it exactly because we are talking about thousands or millions of years ago, and we cannot be sure a 100%, and whoever says the contrary shows a big faith in his presumption, but it's not 100% knowable, you can't really know what happened 100 years ago exactly, some people don't know what they have eaten the last day for dinner, and we ought to know the age of the earth God created?

For me, it's enough to know that this universe and the earth I'm living in was created by God ex nihilo, through His Word. I don't need to know anything else because it won't help me, it won't change my life, it's just a fact that helps your soul with nothing, so my advice for you all is, even if this subject is very interesting, I would say that you don't waste your time so much with it and read more writings of the Bible, the saints, of our jerarchs, of our Fathers, to get richer in the culture of the Church and to work in our redemption, focusing on the Gospel.
 
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"I am pretty sure the dental and medical fields would fall under the sciences"

They do, but not everyone working within those fields are scientists. Scientists are researchers. Doctors, dentists, nurses, etc are practitioners of medicine.

Some do research, in that context they would be considered "scientists". But if you're not doing research, but applying the results of research, you're not a scientist.

This is why I've said time and time again that if you are not doing scientific research requiring you to apply the principles of evolutionary theory. Evolution as a theory in and of itself does not require you to believe it, use it, apply it, etc. It will not have much, if any, bearing on your daily life.

Why this isn't understood by some here, I don't know. The only thing I can think of is that those who don't understand have not been trained in scientific research and have not done so (I have, BTW). Therefore, they are seeing a false dichotomy where there doesn't need to be one.
 
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the original question:

"Can you believe in YEC and still be a scientist?"

you said:

"yes you can. there is a monk I know who has his DDS, and he believes in YEC"

Myself and someone else told you that a DDS is not a scientist.

So yes, you did say that a non scientist is a scientist and can believe in YEC.
 
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ArmyMatt

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Well, according to your definition, that would depend on how much research he did. Since I did not mention how much he did or did not do, your point is still meaningless. If I said he never researched then you would be correct. However, that is not what I said
 
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