I'd typed a longer reply but Mozilla crashed while, of all things, downloading some bibles from e-sword.
I think you are stuck in an all or nothing frame of mind. I'm very careful to say that science alone cannot lead us to a six day 6,000 year old miracle. I don't know of any YEC groups that would assert we can look at the physical evidence alone with naturalistic presuppositions and come to that conclusion. It's impossible to come to such a conclusion apart from historical testimonial evidence. Revelation is necessary, much like it is necessary in courts of law. Now courts don't consider supernatural causation, but they do consider human intervention. Human decisions, much like supernatural causes, are not predictable in that same sense. But Im also careful not to say science can't play any role or shouldnt play any role. It should.
There may be creationists out there claiming they can prove YE creationism from science alone apart form the Bible, but I think these are mistaken. So far AiG seems to be the only group (perhaps there are others) that understands the importance of presuppositions.
I don't think they understand the importance of presuppositions, either. Here's a look at what some of the creationists they interviewed believe:
(all emphases following are added) :
KH [interviewer]: Prof. Kelly, does your taking a stand on a literal Genesis put you in a minority camp among theologians?
DK: In regard to belief in 6-day creation, 24hour days and a relatively young earth, yes. But I am glad to see that some particularly younger colleagues take the same stand. I think there is a shift in the direction of Creation in the way Genesis teaches, more than at any time in my professional lifetime.
Why do you think this shift is occurring?
I would say that criticisms of evolution are entering into the mainstream of American/British culture. Prior to the early 1960s, it was assumed that no intelligent person could question evolution or a massive age for the cosmos. But even from scientists who are not Christian believers, theres a tremendous amount of material becoming publicly known and discussed, criticizing evolution. I think believers, and some of the intellectuals, are therefore perhaps less intimidated over the issue than they were 20 years ago.
Do you think this is primarily because of the creation movement that God has raised up around the world?
I definitely think so. The movement has publicized in the churches the fact that evolution and vast ages, far from being empirical facts, are instead a philosophical faith position.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i2/kelly.asp
Note the subtle shift from "tremendous amount of material criticizing evolution" to "evolution is a philosophical faith position". A look at AiG's website reveals that this tremendous amount of material is primarily scientific - scientific objections to this, observations that cannot be explained by that, etc. etc. When they say that evolution is a presupposition they really mean to say that evolution is simply false.
Living things are loaded with information. Evolution teaches that this information originally came from non-information, and has progressively increased over millions of years. As a physical scientist, have you ever seen real information arising spontaneously by natural law?
No, that's a very good question. One of the things I ask these people who challenge us is'Have you ever seen one single example, any example, of where information spontaneously arises?' In fact, I was at a conference one weekend and a graduate student in science came up and challenged me. He said, 'Well, there are examples where inflow of energy causes increase in information'. He said, 'There has to be'. And so my response to him was, 'Show me one!' He said, 'All right, I'll go find one'. That was on a Thursday afternoon, and he disappeared, and he was gone for about 24 hours. The next day he came back with red eyes and very tired looking. He said, 'I have been to the library studying, and you're right, there are no cases'.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v15/i4/frog.asp
Again, note that the emphasis isn't on different interpretive frameworks. It isn't a case of "look at this piece of evidence, evolution sees it one way, and creation sees it another." Here the obvious implication is that evolution has no way to interpret this evidence at all! In other words, evolution isn't another framework, it's just wrong.
Although biblical creationists have been able to make good use of his powerful arguments, Dr Behe does not claim to be on our side. When I spoke to him briefly on the phone for this article, he confirmed that if there was good evidence for it [life coming about through some sort of evolutionary process], I would just accept that. A Roman Catholic, he says he does not have any theological difficulties with the idea that we came from fish via ape-like ancestors.
His objection, he says, is scientific.
The Darwinian mechanism [selection by the environment, acting on chance inherited mistakes] does not look like it can produce what it claims to be able to produce.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i3/mousetrap.asp
To be fair, AiG and the ID movement are not exactly synonymous. But note that his "powerful arguments" are precisely arguments which are
all scientific and zero theological. If presupposition determines everything, then how can someone who doesn't start from a theological objection to evolution find a scientific objection to evolution? How come someone doesn't start from a scientific creationist presupposition and yet finds problems with evolution? Again, this viewpoint is trying to tell us that evolution isn't just another equally valid presupposition, it's just wrong.
Mike earnestly searched for evidence of whether God was real, and the Lord kept on bringing him back to creation. As time went on, he increasingly realised that if you start messing with something thats reasonable, clear-cut and straightforward, which is God's Word, you get a lot of serious problems with all of Scripture. He believes that six-day creation is really important, because he says, If you start compromising that which seems to me very obvious in Scripture, youre opening yourself up to compromise in many other areas of the Bible, and thats what I think a lot of people do.
Mike says that he first began to think seriously about the mechanism for an ice age about twenty years ago, when he noticed that the evidence for the boundary of the North American ice sheet was right at the edge of where the presentday permanent winter snow accumulates. He says that putting that together with ideas that other creationists have had over the years was the key.
The important thing for any ice age theory, he says, is to find a way to cool the summers, to stop ice from meltingin most areas that were once glaciated, the winters are already cold enough. One such cooling mechanism was readily available after the Flood, with much volcanic ash and gases still in the air from the breaking up of the crust, which also liberated the fountains of the great deep described in Genesis. Such volcanic matter in the air would reflect much of the suns heat back out to space.
However, just having cooler air is not enough. Mike points out that in Siberia today, there are very low temperatures, but it is so cold that there is not enough moisture in the air to maintain an ice sheet. To have an ice age, he says, you need a way to get lots of water out of the ocean up on to the land. After the Flood you would have both, says Mike. The water that the Bible indicates came from under the ground during the Flood would have been very warm or hot. This water mixing with the preFlood ocean would result in a significantly warmer ocean, right after the Flood, than today. Warmer water means more evaporation. So you have more moisture in the air available for storms, generating snow and ice at middle and upper latitudes, close to the developing ice sheets. And the ash and gases in the air is what gives the cooling of the summers. All this, he points out, would have been like a loaded gun at the end of the Flood. There would have been no way to delay it, an ice age just had to start.
Evolutionists, says Mike, have a favoured astronomical theory for the Ice Age which gives them a little cooling, but no way to get more moisture into the air (a colder world means less evaporation from the oceans).
Mike Oards calculations show that a likely estimate for when the Ice Age reached its maximum would have been around 500 years after the Flood, with about another 200 years to melt. He warns that this is only a ballpark figure, which could vary by hundreds of yearsbut thats still a short time for evolutionists.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v19/i1/freeze.asp
Again, look at what really motivated Michael Oard's Ice Age theories. It's not "some day I was reading the Bible and I figured 'hey, there's got to be an Ice Age somewhere!" or "one day I put on my 'the flood caused a global Ice Age' presupposition glasses and suddenly it all made sense." It was triggered by a
scientific observation, proceeded to become a fully
scientific theory, and then goes on to try to
scientifically refute evolution and long ages. Not a lot of presuppositionalism here.
It really seems to me that the presuppositional line of thought is more of an insurance policy, something trotted out to cover up whenever a particular creationist proof goes sour. (In fact, the main article preaching presuppositionalism actually
was written in response to creationists' disliking AiG for debunking the Zuiyo Maru 'plesiosaur' and moon dust arguments.) You can see that it's clearly not their S.O.P. Who bothers with presupposition - just go out and show that evolution is just wrong! The subtlety that seems to be there in their presuppositional arguments (which anyway plunge one into a
maya, nothing-in-the-past-is-real surrealist relativism) is rarely there in their normal features. Instead, one occasionally gets glaring admissions like these:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i3/paleosols.asp
Clearly Meert considers that paleosols have the potential to refute the global Flood. We agree! The concept of paleosols provides a good test for any biblical geological model. That we can use the Bible to develop a geological model that can be scientifically tested destroys the oft-repeated claim by evolutionists that creation science is not science because it cannot be tested. Were pleased that Meert acknowledges that biblical geology is a valid, scientific approach. But we do not agree that the biblical flood has been falsified.
How on earth can paleosols do anything to "a biblical geological model" if what one believes to be true or not is completely up to presuppositions?
And in response to this:
I'm trying to stick to the philosophical and biblical aspects of the debate, and can't really comment on the technical. I just don't have the background to do so. However I'll still try to respond, in a different way. Water, like anything else, works and flows in accordance with natural processes. Those processes affect the things water comes into contact with in different ways. And water doesn't always affect its environment in the same way. There are variables that can change its affect. The temperature of water, the speed at which it moves, the volume, etc.. If God bypassed any of these processes or variables, it seems logical to me that some affects we would expect to see (with a naturalistic mindset) may be missing. And depending on the mechanism used, we may find some affects that we wouldnt expect to see. The Bible gives us very few details about God's interventions in that event. We know it happened, but not how. And remember God needed to restore the world to functionality after the flood. We dont how much intervention was needed, nor the mechanisms He may have used to accomplish it, but certainly some must have been necessary. Did he physically move the landscape around? What affect did that have on the evidence? Again, it seems irrational to me to dismiss the straightforward account for the sake of science.
you should know that the Genesis Flood was started on Dr. Morris' part as "a lengthy manuscript on the
predictable hydrodynamic effects of such a Flood [the global Flood]" (
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v16/i1/creationist.asp ). AiG's "superior epistemology" clearly has no problems with assuming that hydrodynamics during the Deluge were no different from hydrodynamics today. So why should we?
