Young earth creationist needing info here...

[ServantJohn]

I am a young earth creationist due to upbringing and the lack of evidence to the contrary. Oh, I have seen tons of interpretations of evidence to the contrary but no raw data or hard evidence that debunks young earth creationism. And this is after graduating in the top 1 to 2% of my class so it's not like the concepts were too difficult for me to grasp.

My biology professor used to be a presbyterian sunday school teacher or something but became an athiest. He taught against pseudoscience but didn't give any conclusive evidence to an earth older than 10k years. I asked him once how far back can dating methods be accepted as realiable. He answer 10k years, yet evolutionists are saying things are millions and billions of years old.

If evidence is given that shows that the earth really is billions of years old and that we all evolved from "pond scum", my faith would by no means faulter. I have seen too many miracles first hand to have something so minor cause my faith to crumble. It would, on the other hand, cause me to relook at my accepted interpretations of some Scripture. None of these would change my view of the nature and character of God though.

In short, I am honestly looking for information to either change my mind or have my mind settled on this issue. Thanks everyone!!!

PS: If Adam was allegorical and not an actual Adam, how does that affect the view of original sin? This is just one of those things that will have to be modified. Thanks.

 

[Greg1234]

PS: If Adam was allegorical and not an actual Adam, how does that affect the view of original sin? This is just one of those things that will have to be modified. Thanks.

Could you guys at least try to be less conspicuous.

 

[ServantJohn]

Could you guys at least try to be less conspicuous.

Huh? I'm not sure what you are getting at. After I posted, this thought came to mind as I was thinking of how my understanding might have to change. I figured someone has probably already delt with this issue so how was it delt with?

 

[Greg1234]

Huh?

Again, the age of the earth does not affect whether or not man was created. Nor does it necessitate a "modification" of Adam.

 

[bibleblevr]

What do you have against radiometric dating? Or the fossil record?

As for adam, I have not solved this one to my satisfaction either. My best guess is that adam refers to a group that God lead into a garden and breathed souls into. This group eventually became prideful, possibly because of there elevation above the other men of the wourld, this seperated them from God leving them in a fallen state ect...

 

[Sphinx777]

Have you read through this article?

Age of the Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



​

 

[Greg1234]

I'm not sure what you are getting at.

You are conflating two different aspects. This quote binds an interpretation of Adam with how old the universe is.

After I posted, this thought came to mind as I was thinking of how my understanding might have to change. I figured someone has probably already delt with this issue so how was it delt with?

Your understanding changes with that relating to microbe to man through random mutations. The heredity of Adam along with the evidence for it, is not affected by how old the universe is.

 

[laconicstudent]

I am a young earth creationist due to upbringing and the lack of evidence to the contrary. Oh, I have seen tons of interpretations of evidence to the contrary but no raw data or hard evidence that debunks young earth creationism. And this is after graduating in the top 1 to 2% of my class so it's not like the concepts were too difficult for me to grasp.

My biology professor used to be a presbyterian sunday school teacher or something but became an athiest. He taught against pseudoscience but didn't give any conclusive evidence to an earth older than 10k years. I asked him once how far back can dating methods be accepted as realiable. He answer 10k years, yet evolutionists are saying things are millions and billions of years old.

If evidence is given that shows that the earth really is billions of years old and that we all evolved from "pond scum", my faith would by no means faulter. I have seen too many miracles first hand to have something so minor cause my faith to crumble. It would, on the other hand, cause me to relook at my accepted interpretations of some Scripture. None of these would change my view of the nature and character of God though.

In short, I am honestly looking for information to either change my mind or have my mind settled on this issue. Thanks everyone!!!

PS: If Adam was allegorical and not an actual Adam, how does that affect the view of original sin? This is just one of those things that will have to be modified. Thanks.

 

[ServantJohn]

You are conflating two different aspects. This quote binds an interpretation of Adam with how old the universe is.

Your understanding changes with that relating to microbe to man through random mutations. The heredity of Adam along with the evidence for it, is not affected by how old the universe is.

OK, the thought did cross my mind that the earth could be old and Adam still be an actual Adam if that is what you are saying. Adam could be the first man evolved from primates for that matter or God could have created Adam and Eve after the earth "became without form and void".

I left the PS as it is because I assumed that most people who support an old earth view also support the view that Adam was not an actual man. With those points duly separated, how is the issue handled by those who do not believe in an actual Adam?

 

[Mallon]

I am a young earth creationist due to upbringing and the lack of evidence to the contrary. Oh, I have seen tons of interpretations of evidence to the contrary but no raw data or hard evidence that debunks young earth creationism.

What "raw data" or "hard evidence" would change your mind?

 

[Greg1234]

OK, the thought did cross my mind that the earth could be old and Adam still be an actual Adam if that is what you are saying. Adam could be the first man evolved from primates for that matter or God could have created Adam and Eve after the earth "became without form and void".

So you've suddenly transformed into a Darwinist. Didn't see that coming. No, it does not mean that microbes can become men.

I left the PS as it is because I assumed that most people who support an old earth view also support the view that Adam was not an actual man. With those points duly separated, how is the issue handled by those who do not believe in an actual Adam?

Ask them. Pertaining to Darwinists, from beasts falling in mud to excerpts from "Planet of the Apes", you'll find everything.

 

[gluadys]

I am a young earth creationist due to upbringing and the lack of evidence to the contrary. Oh, I have seen tons of interpretations of evidence to the contrary but no raw data or hard evidence that debunks young earth creationism. And this is after graduating in the top 1 to 2% of my class so it's not like the concepts were too difficult for me to grasp.

My biology professor used to be a presbyterian sunday school teacher or something but became an athiest. He taught against pseudoscience but didn't give any conclusive evidence to an earth older than 10k years. I asked him once how far back can dating methods be accepted as realiable. He answer 10k years, yet evolutionists are saying things are millions and billions of years old.

If evidence is given that shows that the earth really is billions of years old and that we all evolved from "pond scum", my faith would by no means faulter. I have seen too many miracles first hand to have something so minor cause my faith to crumble. It would, on the other hand, cause me to relook at my accepted interpretations of some Scripture. None of these would change my view of the nature and character of God though.

In short, I am honestly looking for information to either change my mind or have my mind settled on this issue. Thanks everyone!!!

PS: If Adam was allegorical and not an actual Adam, how does that affect the view of original sin? This is just one of those things that will have to be modified. Thanks.

I don't know why your Sunday school teacher would say dating methods are only good to 10K years, unless he was very out of touch with even 19th century science. Sometimes we forget that it was primarily Christian scientists who discovered geological time and that the earth was known to be at least 100 million years old by 1840. That's two decades before Darwin published. In fact, it is even before he developed a theory of evolution.

Today's dating methods are even more precise. Dendrochronology is good for about 10K years. Varves are good for 50-100k years depending on the formation. Ice cores and sediment cores are also good for much more than 10s of thousands of years. Carbon 14 is good for 50-70 thousand years. And isochron dating is reliable for billions of years. The age of the oldest rocks in the solar system are known to be within 1% of 4.5 billion years.

If you are skeptical about radiometric dating it is probably because you don't know enough of the science to understand its reliability. Remedy: study physics.

You might also be interested in this article by a Christian who understands radiometric dating: Radiometric Dating



You say you studied it evolution (I assume in high school or was it college?), so you are probably familiar with most of the concepts outlined in this on-line study. Understanding Evolution

Is there any specific question you would like answered about the science of evolution?

If not, I assume your actual questions are about how one can accept a Christian theology and interpret the Bible with respect for its authority while accepting the validity of the science.

Many of the regular posters here are theistic evolutionists (or, as some prefer to call themselves, "evolutionary creationists") and would be pleased to answer your questions. There are also many other sites where you can have your questions answered by Christians who accept evolution.

Here are a few links:

BEYOND THE FIRMAMENT » Does Science Contradict the Bible?
The BioLogos Forum
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dlamoure/evolutionary_creation.pdf
Evolutionary Christianity || Welcome to our Evolutionary Christianity Global Community, Please Introduce Yourself
An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution: Welcome to the Dialogue
American Scientific Affiliation: A Network of Christians in Science

Happy reading!

 

[ServantJohn]

What do you have against radiometric dating? Or the fossil record?

As for adam, I have not solved this one to my satisfaction either. My best guess is that adam refers to a group that God lead into a garden and breathed souls into. This group eventually became prideful, possibly because of there elevation above the other men of the wourld, this seperated them from God leving them in a fallen state ect...

Thanks for the post. There are very obvious flaws in radiometric dating such as unknown initial concentrations and lack of a closed system. With that said, statistical measures can be used to estimate the initial concentrations and possibly to take into account the lack of a closed system. The latter being applied based on geological evidence. I have not seen the evidence though. All I have ever seen are interpretations, not the raw data.

The fossil record is getting close. If anything is going to change my mind, it will probably be the fossil record. Evolution does a great job of explaining how we have so many species after the ark but not much beyond that. I wish I could show that last sentence to that biology professor lol.

I can dig the Adam thing but if we are going to have a real Adam come from evolution, might as well go ahead and give him a real tree and fruit.

 

[ServantJohn]

The age of the oldest rocks in the solar system are known to be within 1% of 4.5 billion years.

Now that is what I am talking about. You almost lost that beautiful little nugget in that long post. Where is that study? or how they got their numbers? That's all I am needing right there.

Looks like you gonna make me do some reading and searching LOL.

Oh, I did study physics and lots of chemistry (all A's). My Sunday school teacher was one of the chemistry professors at the university.

 

[juvenissun]

Now that is what I am talking about. You almost lost that beautiful little nugget in that long post. Where is that study? or how they got their numbers? That's all I am needing right there.

Looks like you gonna make me do some reading and searching LOL.

Oh, I did study physics and lots of chemistry (all A's). My Sunday school teacher was one of the chemistry professors at the university.

The dating stuff is called geochronology. It is typically a course offered to seniors or graduate students in geology major. Many professional geologists also engaged in all sort of geochronological studies. So, I can sure you, the study makes sense. The deeper you dig into it, the more sense it would make. It is a technique of measuring. It is not much different from weighing gold by a very precise weighing method, and get a number to represent the weight.

But, there are also many other features on the earth that do not quite fit the long period of time suggested by geochronology. That is where the doubt of an old earth begins. Many controversies suggested by creationists would be a good start to think about these problems.

 

[Willtor]

You could use dendrochronology to calibrate some of the shorter-lived isotopes, and bootstrap from there. The more you extrapolate, of course, the less accurate. But there is no doubt it takes us back well beyond 10,000 years. Even the dendrochronology, itself, takes us further back than that.

To my mind, the real strength of all of the various dating methods is that they tend to point to about the same age. This kind of reasoning is a popular debugging technique in software: if two different algorithms produce the same value, it's probably the right value. I.e., if either one or both were wrong, it's unlikely they would be wrong in the same way. Likewise, if there are many dating techniques in different fields that all say the same thing, they are probably right.

 

[gluadys]

Now that is what I am talking about. You almost lost that beautiful little nugget in that long post. Where is that study? or how they got their numbers? That's all I am needing right there.

I don't know where the original studies are (I expect there were more than one). But you could begin here and follow up the references to the original papers.

The Age of the Earth

Looks like you gonna make me do some reading and searching LOL.

Why not? If you are serious about learning, you need to take the initiative. I've learned most of what I know in science by surfing the net over the last 15 years. (Detested science in high school.)

Oh, I did study physics and lots of chemistry (all A's). My Sunday school teacher was one of the chemistry professors at the university.

What level though? Since you don't give your age I don't know if you are an 18-year-old with no more than high-school or freshman courses or 30+ with a post-grad degree under your belt.

There are very obvious flaws in radiometric dating such as unknown initial concentrations and lack of a closed system.

Actually, these are not as serious a problem as you may think. In some cases it is not necessary to know the initial concentration; in others it is not difficult to ascertain the initial concentrations. The Weins article on radiometry that I linked to in my earlier post covers this concern for a variety of radiometric techniques.

As Willtor says, what convinces most scientists of the accuracy of the dating is that various different dating techniques some using radio-active decay and others not, tend to converge on the same dates. That is unheard of if one or more are not accurate. There are so many more ways to be wrong than right, that error-prone techniques should show dates going every which way as different techniques are used. That is not what we see when comparisons are made across different methods of dating.

To take one of my favorite examples, why would plate tectonic movement give the same dating for the origin of the various Hawaiian islands as radioisotope dating of the rocks?

 

[Papias]

John wrote:

In short, I am honestly looking for information to either change my mind or have my mind settled on this issue. Thanks everyone!!!

First, welcome to the forums! It's quite refreshing to have someone honestly asking questions.

Second, it's also great to see another Christian willing to embrace both sides as Christians. One can be a good Christian whether one supports evolution or is a creationist. Too often we all see Christians claiming to be "Christianer than thou....".

Now, some of your questions:

PS: If Adam was allegorical and not an actual Adam, how does that affect the view of original sin? This is just one of those things that will have to be modified. Thanks.

I noticed you already came up with an answer similar to the Catholic Church and many Protestants as well, which is that Adam was a literal, real, first human individual, who was a transitional between ape and human. I've described this all over, on many threads. For instance, this:


.... the idea of Adam as the first transitional ape-human to get a mutation pushing him over the line to being fully human, and hence getting a specially created soul from God, before rebelling to cause original sin, again?
..........
Of course it is a slow process, but there has to be a first human, even if it is only barely more human than his parents, right?

and this:

I think we agree that the human brain is well advanced compared to the chimp brain. How many mutations is that, in your estimation? Let's say it is 24,863 mutations. It may not be that many, but who knows - I'm not a biologist.

Now, imagine a chimp-like ancestor with none of those. He has a child with one of them. call him "00001". Is that Adam, a human, or is that child a chimp? We agree he's pretty much a chimp, right?

After many generations, his descendant has 49 of those mutations. Still pretty much a chimp, right? I think so.

How about at 312 mutations? Still pretty much a chimp, right? I think so.

You can see that at some point, say halfway, at 12,432 mutations, he'll now be closer to a human. So whatever line you pick, it has to be crossed sometime.

If we say that 12,431 is closer to a chimp, then 0012431 is not Adam, while his son, who is 0012432, IS Adam, and is human. (post #32)


are from here:

http://www.christianforums.com/t7524679-4/

As others have pointed out, the clincher on the age of the Earth is that there are many different dating methods, and that hundreds of samples have been tested by many different methods. THe different methods give the same ages, even when some of the methods are not radioactive. If any of them were wrong, they wouldn't all agree with each other, espeically not over literally hundreds of samples, in thousands of separate tests.

From another thread:

Imagine that you were trying to find out when something happened, for example a car crash. If you could estimate the time from several different methods, and they all agreed, what would that tell you? If the methods were not reliable, then they give results that could not be reconciled with each other.

So, wouldn't the agreement of even three methods pretty powerful evidence? I mean, if a smashed clock at a car wreck was stuck at 5:32, the nearby security camera taped the crash at 5:28, and the tow truck's receipt from towing the car had a time of 5:46 that day, wouldn't it be hard to suggest a time other than around 5:30 for the crash? That's only 3 pieces of evidence and though the measurements don't agree exactly (5:28 isn't exactly the same as 5:32), they all are consistent with a crash very near 5:30.

This is what we've been saying about the many dating methods. There are around 50 of them, many of them aren't radioactive, and when a given fossil or other sample is tested by several of them, the different methods give the same age, independently.

For instance, an arrow could be testable by:
C14 (giving an age of 6,400 years, +/- 100),
dendrochronology (giving an age of 6,385 years),
, amino racimization (giving an age of 6,360 years, +/- 220),
, obsidian hydration, (giving an age of 6,424 years, +/- 142), and association. Or a piece of wood in a lake could easily be tested by varves, C14, dendrochronology, superposition, and association. And other sample can easily have more - there are over four dozen methods, after all.

This repeated testing has been done over and over, on literally hundreds of samples, in thousands of tests, confirming these methods. The experts who have devoted their lives to this actuall do know their stuff.

I'm sure some actual data, from this kind of testing, would be useful too.

Here are data from literally hundreds of samples, with testing by the different dating methods of:
dendrochronology,
speleotherm dating,
carbon 14 (that method is radioactive),
varves,
and coral growth layers.

They all agree with each other, confirming both these methods and the age of the samples. And this example is far from an isolated case. Studies like this have been done hundreds of times, by labratories around the world. I know you've been told the opposite by creationist publications and such, but they have simply misled you, and hidden examples like this from you. Perhaps it would be worth your time to learn how these different methods work, so you can see that they are truly independent of each other?

See post #84, here, for a graph of some of the data.
http://www.christianforums.com/t7522073-9/#post56456930


The good thing is that understanding God's creation better can make your Christianity stronger. We Christians don't need to hide from the real evidence from the real world, only to update our understanding of God as God wants us to do.

In Christ-

Papias

 

[Papias]

John-

While my other post (just before this one) gave a lot of information, I noticed that I missed one of your questions.

The fossil record is getting close. If anything is going to change my mind, it will probably be the fossil record.

Well, there are literally hundreds of transitional fossils. The major transitions of fish to lizard, lizard to mammal, beast to whale, ape to human, and many more are very well supported. The fossil record alone is enough to establish evolution beyond a reasonable doubt. You'll find some transitional fossils under item I, 4 here:


29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent

However, at the same time, remember that it is the fact that many different fields of study all give the same answer of evolution that makes evolution so well established. They don't just confirm that evolution happened, but rather they confirm the same family tree of all life - that this specific animal evolved into this other specific animal, and so on. That includes genetics (if looking into genetics, be sure to understand GULOP, ERVs and chromosome #2), physiology, molecular biology, biogeography, anatomy, and on and on.

Because of this, if there were no fossils, none at all, then evolution would still be undeniable because of all the other evidence. You'll see some of that other evidence at the link I gave above.

Enjoy! After all, all truth is God's truth-

Papias

 

[Greg1234]

The fossil record alone is enough to establish evolution beyond a reasonable doubt.

No its not. Factor in the so called anomalies and the fact that the distribution of fossils along with the appearance of man towards the latter stages in no way ever conflicted with the information garnered from text, then what is actually being erected is a straw man. Further, when all tests indicate that adaptation occurs within limits(among other findings), this renders the distribution of fossils subject to the concept which has accommodated these findings. This is Creationism.

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent

Which has been addressed then readdressed.

However, at the same time, remember that it is the fact that many different fields of study all give the same answer of evolution that makes evolution so well established. They don't just confirm that evolution happened, but rather they confirm the same family tree of all life - that this specific animal evolved into this other specific animal, and so on. That includes genetics (if looking into genetics, be sure to understand GULOP, ERVs and chromosome #2), physiology, molecular biology, biogeography, anatomy, and on and on.

Understanding these concepts in no way automatically leads to a Darwinian conclusion. In fact, with their application into experimental analysis, just the opposite occurs.

Enjoy! After all, all truth is God's truth-

Papias

Lol