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I don't know about that. As a TE I find I am much more willing to take the plain meaning seriously. I am comfortable with Gen 1 portraying a flat earth and a bowl shapped sky with sun and stars embedded in it. I don't mind Genesis 2 having a completely different order of creation to Gen 1, or Joshua and Ecclesiastes describing a geocentric cosmos. I can live with the cognitive dissonance because I know my God is bigger and his word is bigger than my confusion. (Looking back I loved paradox in the bible long before I became a TE.)Lots of people can be much brighter people and better Christians than me. But, let me give an example of what I am looking for. I admit a problem in consistency between "this is my body" and a literal view of Genesis. I believe they can be reconciled, but my methods have not provided the consistency that I would like to have.
What TE is not giving me is any acknowledgement of TE's inconcistency on important issues in the Bible or in science. Believe what you want about what God expects in terms of how you view reality. But, lets be clear about the inconsistency in claiming to "take scripture seriously" while chucking some measure of plain meaning.
Arguing about God's feathers..? Moi?You needn't become YEC as a consequence of admitting the problem. But I don't think you will be offering God's feathers as a helpful argument if you acknowledge the common problem of consistency in reason.
Not sure you can have 'evidence is much more consistent with YEC' and 'the universe was created just as if it were mature'Obviously, I dispute that the evidence on earth supports the TOE over YEC. I believe the *evidence* (not the conventional conclusions, conjectures, and extrapolations) are much more consistent with YEC which is much more consistent with the revelation of a loving God.
The flood didn't wipe out 90% of all ocean life now did it? And I seriously hope you aren't proposing that Noah and the animals were floating around in the Ocean while the Earth was being bombarded by asteroids equivalent to billions of nuclear warheads, throwing up trillions of tons of dust in the air, leading to total darkness for years, and vaporizing everything in their path are you?Obviously, we'd have to talk about each "event" and see how it did or did not fit into the YEC model. AFAIK, a few of the identified "events" were actually *during* the flood, and part of it. However, if you are using an interpretational framework that denies the flood, you need to come up with a separate event.
And varying ratios of radiometric isotopes in the rocks that make up the world which look as if they have been maturing for millions or billions or years?
What about meteorites with a radiometric age of 4.5 billion years which fits nicely with the oldest rocks on earth of 4.4 billion years?
And varying ratios of radiometric isotopes in the rocks that make up the world which look as if they have been maturing for millions or billions or years?
What about meteorites with a radiometric age of 4.5 billion years which fits nicely with the oldest rocks on earth of 4.4 billion years?
Dr. Wiens has a PhD in Physics, with a minor in Geology. His PhD thesis was on isotope ratios in meteorites, including surface exposure dating. He was employed at Caltech's Division of Geological & Planetary Sciences at the time of writing the first edition. He is presently employed in the Space & Atmospheric Sciences Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
New experiments done this year for the RATE project1 strongly support a young earth. This article updates results announced in an ICR Impact article last year2 and documented at a technical conference last summer.3 Our experiments measured how rapidly nuclear-decay-generated Helium escapes from tiny radio-active crystals in granite-like rock. The new data extend into a critical range of temperatures, and they resoundingly confirm a num-erical prediction we published several years before the experiments.4 The Helium loss rate is so high that almost all of it would have escaped during the alleged 1.5 billion year uniformitarian5 age of the rock, and there would be very little Helium in the crystals today. But the crystals in granitic rock presently contain a very large amount of Helium, and the new experiments support an age of only 6000 years. Thus these data are powerful evidence against the long ages of uniformitarianism and for a recent creation consistent with Scripture. Here are some details:
Radioactive crystals make and lose Helium
These radioactive crystals, called zircons, are common in granitic rock. As a zircon crystal grows in cooling magma, it incorporates Uranium and Thorium atoms from the magma into its crystal lattice. After a zircon is fully formed and the magma cools some more, a crystal of black mica called biotite forms around it. Other minerals, such as quartz and feldspar, form adjacent to the biotite.
The Uranium and Thorium atoms inside a zircon decay through a series of intermediate elements to eventually become atoms of Lead. Many of the inter-mediate nuclei emit alpha particles, which are nuclei of Helium atoms. For zircons of the sizes we are considering, most of the fast-moving alpha particles slow to a stop within the zircon. Then they gather two electrons apiece from the surrounding crystal and become Helium atoms. Thus a Uranium 238 atom produces eight Helium atoms as it becomes a Lead 206 atom. (See diagram.)
Helium atoms are lightweight, fast-moving, and do not form chemical bonds with other atoms. They move rapidly between the atoms of a material and spread themselves as far apart as possible. This process of diffusion, theoretically well-understood for over a century, makes Helium leak rapidly out of most materials.
Natural zircons still contain much Helium
In 1974, in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, geoscientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory drilled a borehole several miles deep into the hot, dry granitic rock to determine how suitable it would be as a geothermal energy source. They ground up samples from the rock cores, extracted the zircons, and measured the amount of Uranium, Thorium, and Lead in the crystals. From those data they calculated that 1.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay had taken place in the zircons,6 making the usual uniformitarian assumption that decay rates have always been constant.7
Then they sent core samples from the same borehole to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for analysis. At Oak Ridge, Robert Gentry (a well-known creationist) and his colleagues extracted the zircons, selected crystals between 50 and 75 µm (0.002 to 0.003 inches) long, and measured the total amount of Helium in them. They used the Los Alamos Uranium-Lead data to calculate the total amount of Helium the decay had produced in the zircons. Comparing the two values gave the percentage of Helium still retained in the zircons, which they published in 1982.8
Their results were remarkable. Up to 58 percent of the nuclear-decay-generated Helium had not diffused out of the zircons. The percentages decreased with increasing depth and temperature in the borehole. That confirms diffusion had been happening, because the rate of diffusion in any material increases strongly with temperature. Also, the smaller the crystal, the less Helium should be retained. These zircons were both tiny and hot, yet they had retained huge amounts of Helium!
I was commenting on your suggestion
Meteorites seem to have matured at the same radiometric rate as rock on earth.I guess I'd have to say "the universe excluding the earth was created just as if it were mature".
Shades of Robert Gentry indeed. At least they've stopped calling their rock unit the "Jemez granodiorite", but they don't seem to have addressed any of the fundamental flaws found in their research here.How nice!
Shade of Robert Gentry!
Go Pop!
What absolute rot. What are the philosophical presuppositions behind 'plain meaning' hermeneutic? Where can we find it in the Bible? Chapter and verse please. Or are you willing to admit that this 'plain meaning' hermeneutic is a result of modernist thinking borne out of the enlightenment. No of course you aren't.But, lets be clear about the inconsistency in claiming to "take scripture seriously" while chucking some measure of plain meaning.
There is no inconsistency, there is no problem.You needn't become YEC as a consequence of admitting the problem. But I don't think you will be offering God's feathers as a helpful argument if you acknowledge the common problem of consistency in reason.
At the end of the day, how much of this will really matter?
What will really be important- that you are a YEC or an TE? That you provided an eloquent case here to show that your interpretation is correct? That science prevailed?
What should you be focusing on as you take your last breath on this earth?
The fact that Jesus and his disciples did not seem to spend much time on these questions I think provides an answer.
You're right friend, but as has been numerously mentioned, this is not about one's individuals position, but the sale of an erroneous position to the masses. Today people know more about a museum with men walking with dinosaurs, than they do about the gospel.Today people know more about how Peanut butter disproves evolution, than they do about the "Sermon on the Mount". Today, the house of God is a den of thieves and liars, who have distorted the reality of their masses.
Gullibility and dubious reasoning go hand in hand, it's time someone wake up to reality.
It's not about one's on literal belief, or allegorical belief, but what these beliefs have done to close the doors of the Kingdom of God, to people who have long lost sight of the light.
The best way to open the doors of the Kingdom of God is to act like Christ, not shove scientific facts down someone's throat. This goes for both parties. Showing that you care for someone will do much more than proving to them whether or not evolution exists.
For people to accept the Christian faith then it must be intelligible to them. There are certain 'cultural defeaters' which make Christianity unintelligible to many in society these days. Creationism is just one of those cultural defeaters, many people I have encountered reject Christianity because they thought that to accept the Christian faith was to roll society back to the dark ages of scientific illiteracy. This is why Creationism must be shown for what it is - inconsistent with reality, nature and, above all, scripture itself.
Obviously I do not accept evolution to make Christianity more intelligible to me or to others, I was a Creationist until about 6 years ago, I accept it because of the evidence.
This isn't about trying to convert people with science, it's about removing stumbling blocks to Christ.
The society I'm talking about is the society that you and most of American fundamentalist Christianity is out of touch with.What people? The 200,000 or so enrolled in secular colleges? What society are you talking about? The one that mostly disagrees with you or the academic one that falls into lock step on evolution?
ANd if you want to go put evolutionary pants on the natives, don't expect a lot of help.
What people? The 200,000 or so enrolled in secular colleges? What society are you talking about? The one that mostly disagrees with you or the academic one that falls into lock step on evolution?
ANd if you want to go put evolutionary pants on the natives, don't expect a lot of help.
I know that some of you here are much better at reasoning than most YECs, but surely you can't deny the huge percentage of new members who come here rattling off PRATTS (specifically those on the AiG list that really are baseless). Could it be that the rejection of education has lead the vast majority of these YEC Christians to be brainwashed by charismatic speakers rather than convinced by logical arguments?
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