I am a young earth creationist is there any other people

When I was younger at university the belief in evolution really did damage to me
I did chemistry and physics and I was convinced from the scientific evidence regarding thing like genetics , cosmology and even fossil evidence to believe in a young earth as the only qualifications that Darwin had was a theology degree
As I am out in Portugal i can post several lines of evidence for young earth creationism

Dominic,

please let us not discuss on that topic. I do not believe in evolution, and do currently have a lot to do with science. But... whether the earth is young or old - I do not know, and it does not really bother me. Is it relevant for the salvation of our souls? - No! Then it is really not worth the effort. I know some people, who concerning faith have made shipwreck by discussing such questions. (1 Timothy 1:19)

"Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers." (2 Timothy 2:14)

There are really more important themes to be discussed and the one thing that unites us should be Christ, not young/ old earth belief!

Peace be unto you!

Agreed-

Why do you want to rehash this again Dom?

It's awesome that you are a YEC!

Meanwhile, check out this wonder of God's creation:

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/hubble-ngc-3256-06057.html

YEC is a great topic, Old earthers who have jettisoned the bible for today's Psuedo-science will throw a fit. Theistic evolutionists, Day-agers and numerous other poetry claimers cannot stomach the simple genesis account.

These all have an agenda Dom, its to preserve their pet theories which are linked to their own private interpretations of scripture. Its only a controversial topic because unbelief demands the bible bow to human philosophies. I say philosophies because science-proper does not offer the Christian false alternatives to biblical truth, only the philosophies embedded in their latest theories demand biblical Christians to bow to them.

Why should this topic be more controversial than the Deity of Christ? Or the Salvation by grace alone? Because to deny these will not give them a platform to deny the scripture in other areas. In short, they couldn't get access to this website.

To me, denial of Genesis is the same as denial of Salvation by grace. The difference being of course I have to make room for those Christians who are deceived while contending with those who are deceivers who have no loyalty to the word of God.

Dom, if you want to find a bee-hive of falsehoods, just sign up for some apologetics sites, these usually have plenty of old earthers and theistic evolutionists. At least there you will not have to sift through a dozen posts to sniff out the compromisers, there they just flatly state they have as strong a loyalty to their own theories and education as they claim to have to the bible.

Genesis deniers enter into the Christian camp just like the heretics seeking to enter today...Gay is the way, God made us like this, homosexuality is not a sin etc. The idea is to project their distorted understanding of human identity upon God and distort his identity, thereby undermining his claims to holiness, righteousness and justice. The idea is to gain these little inroads so that much larger and more damaging heresy can take root.

Ive heard it many a time, YEC is heretical, YEC is anti-science and other such non-sense, but at the end of the day, YEC has made a choice to take God at his word, the rest do not and no matter what they say and how hard they resist, that is exactly what they are doing.

Brother Blaine was always happy to die on the "prayer for he persecuted Church hill". Unfortunately you will find over and over again there are no hills worth dying on, no truths worth giving the appearance of being the mean-guy or the bad-guy.

Those who loose the faith over a debate on whether the word of God describes the creation of the earth were not saved to begin with. 'the sun came up and scorched them', leaving the faith over a debated issue doesnt even blip the persecution meter.

All these excuses to keep quiet, keep it all 'Jesus loves me Kum-by-ya' are what a devil would use to silence truth.

So, all you're going to get is a link to past debates calling you into question for bringing up this topic. When a topic like this is nay-nayed...thats exactly the topic I want to discuss; because behind it all and behind all the latent cowardice masquerading as 'peace among us' is unbelief, deceptions and lies that cannot keep their place if what is believed is challenged.

You might ask yourself Dom, what did you say in defense of YEC in the last thread that was completely refuted? I'd say nothing. In short what was put forth was not even challenged with any successful rebutal to YEC. So, bringing it back up only shows the weakness and insufficiency of old earth thinking as well as theistic evolution.

Folks will run from controversy because they think God is telling them to run from 'division and strife', but he's not, they are listening to themselves. My Brothers and sister are so afraid of looking bad, every truth is sacrificed on the altar of appearance.

Gloryandgrace wrote:

Why should this topic be more controversial than the Deity of Christ? Or the Salvation by grace alone? Because to deny these will not give them a platform to deny the scripture in other areas. In short, they couldn't get access to this website.

To me, denial of Genesis is the same as denial of Salvation by grace. The difference being of course I have to make room for those Christians who are deceived while contending with those who are deceivers who have no loyalty to the word of God.

Bro Marvin, you are preaching now sir! I confess that as an unlearned country boy I am ignorant to what the YEC/old earth conversation is all about but anybody that doesn't believe every part of the Bible as it is written is not saved and on their way to hell. The Same bible that tells Jesus is the Son of God is the same bible that gives the account of the creation. To deny one part is to deny all.

The Bible says Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, not by scientific theories and opinions of man. This is the reason why there is such unbelief in the church and world because we have placed our faith in what man has to say over what the Bible says.

Off topic of YEC but I would like to add since you brought this up we now have unbelievers preaching in the pulpit that God no longer does miracles or that the gifts of the Holy Ghost are not available for today's church. They call it cessation, God calls it unbelief. The Bible says Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. With God shall nothing be impossible. The Apostle Peter said the gift of the Holy Ghost wasn't just for them but for all that the Lord did call.

How can one claim that God can still save a soul today, but cannot heal a body, or going a step further, preserve His perfect Word for this generation? A double minded man is unstable in all His ways. How can one claim to believe John 3:16 and not Genesis 1?

Thanks for that great Word brother, you spoke to me.

Elijah; you said.."How can one claim to believe John 3:16 and not Genesis 1?"

This is my conclusion as well, both are known by revelation, but Genesis has been attacked today and revelation for the believer is reportedly not sufficient, he needs scientific approvals and modern-mans validation. Because of this, Genesis 1 falls into poetry, myth and analogy. Why? Because Satan wants to get at John 3:16 with the same mindset and reduce it to poetry, myth and analogy. Man cannot be saved by poetry, but by the God who created man and sent his Son to redeem fallen men. A God who created the world and tells us about it, is the same God who sent his Son to be crucified and tells us about it.

The skeptic of Genesis 1 demands we differentiate between accounts, Satan now finding allies, moves in them to create doubt in the word of God...so that miracles, healings, Holy Spirit ministry can all be undone with the simple question "hath God said" to Genesis 1. If God does no miraculous work in Genesis, we undermine the idea of a miracle working God from the outset, all that remains is adding more skeptical questions to any other 'miracle' testimonies.

I have to say (this has been on my mind for some time), I believe satan is trying to cause division in this chatroom. I believe some people are legitimately seeking answers to questions or trying to gain new perspectives, but some people just want controversy, while other sincere believers are being used unwittingly (and if you don't believe that can happen, just look at Jesus rebuking Peter).

Please, please, I implore you, pray before you post anything. Don't just try to win an argument.

Trying to understand what you are saying brother Marvin...

here is a list of ministers who believed in the Gap creationism.

Religious proponents of the gap creationism have included Oral Roberts, Cyrus I. Scofield, Harry Rimmer, Jimmy Swaggart,[8] G. H. Pember, L. Allen Higley,[4] Arthur Pink, Peter Ruckman, Finis Jennings Dake, Chuck Missler, E. W. Bullinger, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Herbert W. Armstrong, Garner Ted Armstrong, Michael Pearl and Clarence Larkin.

Are you saying these ministers don't believe the whole bible or are not saved?

Just trying to understand...

Dominic,

Don't know if this will help you, but will share it...

Our oldest son graduated from MUW in the early nineties with a degree in microbiology. (He had professors that were evolutionist.) He is a creationist, believes in a young earth -and he would agree with you 100%. He came to this conclusion because of his studies in the physical, biological sciences that it proves the creation by God as recorded in Genesis.

God bless.

Sandra

Once again a person does not have to be a YEC to NOT believe in evolution. The leading Christian proponent of a billions of year old earth DOES NOT BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION.

Automatically equating belief in an ancient earth with a belief in evolution is a RED HERRING and DISHONEST.

Obviously, atheistic scientists believe in an ancient universe AND evolution. They are simply wrong about the latter.

I am saying theistic evolution and old earth creationism are compromises to the Faith. Gap-creationism means what?
Are you referring to an alleged gap between Gen 1:1 and 1:2? If so, even the literalists who believe that will not throw the remainder into "poetry" so as to allegorize the creation.

Ive read Pink on creation by way of his commentary on Genesis 1, I think Brother Pink is being influenced by the mounting interest during that time for evolution and was making a way for science ( as the thought ) was helping us understand Genesis 1. We have since found out we didn't need the evolutionists or old earthers to help us with Genesis 1.

Numerous other preachers were compromisers in other areas too. Dake, Bullinger, Armstrong (both of them cultists).

But, Pink goes farther than merely asserting the possibility of a gap between vs 1 and 2.

Brother banks, I am not saying it's my way or the highway, I am saying to endorse old earth, theistic evolution or some other frame theory is a compromise and twisting of the truth. Their salvation is not my call, but their doctrine is my call and I can judge it accordingly.

I don't count Genesis as a minor, I count it as a major. I consider a mistake here so dangerous and so errant those who have any kind of consistent theological understanding will find ways to compromise other areas of the faith to make room for their compromise in Genesis.

Now, there are plenty who compartmentalize everything. In short, they have no consistency to their theology so they are all over the map. Orthodox here, heterodox there, biblical here, heretical there. These folks are a walking contradiction theologically. In effect, they claim biblical inerrancy over here, but fail to actually teach it in authority when the right people are in the room.

These folks remind me of the prophets Jeremiah complained about. They don't feed the sheep with good grass and clean waters...they trample the grass and muddy the water. So it is with compromisers of Genesis 1.

To be an old-earther is to be "in-the-know" as far as a scientifically saavy preacher. They pretend their learning of various scientific theories gain them a good stand with the 'learned' of the day so when they recite these 'learned men', they acquire a notoriety from them and lots of applause from the unlearned audience. Chuck Missler does this very well. His teachings are packed full of present day scientific jargon and theory, but he has stepped away from the plain reading and revelation of Genesis 1.

A Gap in Genesis vs 1 and 2 are not much of an issue, its conjecture. But old earthers need it to get 14 billion years as a settled fact before they poetize Genesis 1.

//but anybody that doesn't believe every part of the Bible as it is written is not saved and on their way to hell.//

Elijah, not sure how old you are but surely you are not so naive as to make such a statement?

Surely you understand that great heroes of the faith see certain scriptures very differently?

Which ones are you consigning to eternal torment- only those who do not agree with you?

Thank goodness it is God, and not you, who decides the fate of men.

For any who may be interested in digging deeper into the earth, the best book on the subject, both scientifically and theologically would be, "Creation and Change: Revised and Updated" by Douglas Kelly.

It won't disappoint any who do take the time to read it!

When all is read and done, the one thing that really matters is that He may reveal Himself to you, and that you are drawn nearer to Him, and have a closer walk with Him.

For He is the God of Genesis to Revelation, Who has been and always will be. The Great God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Thanks Savannah: I have many books on this subject, but I don't have Dr. Kelly's I'll see about ordering it.

Hi Alec: I never took those who 'gap' Genesis Chapter 1 and 2 seriously. I had a good brother who wanted to write a book on the pre-adamic race. I told him flatly he didn't have any scripture to base it on, only conjecture and the necessary dismantling of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1.
The text of the scripture doesn't intimate it, but I do realize you can isogete until your hearts content on any subject, Genesis 1 is no exception. Over the years I have ran into numerous ones wondering why the seeming differences between Gen chapt 1 and Chapt 2, but it is quickly resolved with simple study.

To get the idea they are 'gapped' you need someone who has a private interpretation that can gain momentum by way of educational notoriety. "Well if Dr. so-and-so says it, it must be good as gold". With that little lie, we are well on our way to 'controversy' and 'debate' and 'scholarly research'...so now the non-scholar cant read Genesis 1 and expect to know what it means. He cannot know what Genesis 2 means either because various scholars have found some obscure text that they claim undoes the greater context contained in the plain reading.

After a time you realize what is being done to you, you are being swindled out of what God is saying and its being replaced with a clandestine entry of a new axiom...namely I need to depend upon man to help me know what God is saying.

When you see it, you cast it out like a devil and treat it as such.

I do the same with those who question the deity of Christ etc.

Todd, thanks for the questions.

You asked Surely you understand that great heroes of the faith see certain scriptures very differently?

The Bible says

2 Peter 1:20-21 KJV
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. [21] For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

You asked Which ones are you consigning to eternal torment- only those who do not agree with you?

Those who Don't agree with the Word of God and love God.

2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 KJV
And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. [11] And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: [12] That they ALL might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

You do realize that Jesus said everyone that doesn't repent will perish? That all unbelievers will be cast into the lake of fire? Do you think people will be in heaven or can be a Christian for that matter that deny the infallibility of the Word of God?

Let me ask you sir, How much Scripture can one deny before you consider him not a Christian?

Hi Alec: This is why this gap stuff is pernicious, you can inject a gap anywhere you want whenever there is some eschatological issue that is seemingly at odds with a straightforward interpretation.

Luke 4 does not offer us a gap, it only offers us a pause in the reading of Isaiah by Jesus.

Even a 1 year old Christian who has begun to read his bible will recognize that whole Chapter 61 is chock full of specific allusions to Jesus and the new covenant. There is no gap.

When Jesus stopped quoting Isaiah 61 at "And the day of vengeance of our God" it is assumed by some that we have justification for some 2000 year gap, therefore injecting a gap in Lukan narrative seemingly solves that 'day of vengeance' issue. But it doesn't at all.

take these verses...
To comfort all who mourn,

vs 3 To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”

vs 6 But you shall be named the priests of the Lord,
They shall call you the servants of our God.

vs 8 For I, the Lord, love justice;
I hate robbery for burnt offering;
I will direct their work in truth,
And will make with them an everlasting covenant.

vs 10 I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
My soul shall be joyful in my God;
For He has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
He has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom decks himself with ornaments,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

11
For as the earth brings forth its bud,
As the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth,
So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.

All of these things mentioned are now fulfilled in the new covenant given at the resurrection of Christ by the preaching of the apostles.

If there is no gap between these texts, why would I put one between 'the day of vengeance'? because eschatologically I have a dispensation problem now, a pre-trib getting in the way, a rapture theory to protect.

Various theological camps need these gaps in order to fix the 'disconnect' between what they teach and scripture narrative. This gap is vital for Daniel 9 and the 70 weeks, you cant get a good rapture teaching without putting a 2000+ year gap between the 69th and 70th week.
But that gap is as useless as the Lukan injected gap. It only muddies the water and requires some rapture expert to iron it all out for us. But that is utterly false.
Remember the axiom "we depend upon man to tell us what scripture says". Without the expert we would not know or interpret anything rightly...so said the Catholics and this undergirded their resistance to allowing the scriptures to be read by the common man.

I have over the years read only a portion of a text, leaving out the complete context...focusing on some specific point that the Spirit of God was dealing with. This does not mean the remainder is gapped until some later date, or that the expression of a text being fulfilled right in front of you negates the rest of the text that would be fulfilled even in the next few years, or in my case already fulfilled in the lives of others but they were unaware of it.

We were taught to put in a gap in the Lukan text because our teachers taught poorly.

//but anybody that doesn't believe every part of the Bible as it is written is not saved and on their way to hell.//

Elijah- that was your exact quote. If you did not mean that, then by all means please clarify what you meant. I am assuming you may have misspoke.

No sir, you read it right.

Revelation 21:8 KJV
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

Mark 8:38 KJV
Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

John 17:17 KJV
Sanctify them through thy truth: thy WORD IS TRUTH

2 Thessalonians 2:11-12 KJV

2 Thessalonians 2:10 KJV
And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the LOVE OF THE TRUTH, that they might be SAVED
And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: [12] That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Jesus said I am the way, truth and life. Jesus is the Word made flesh. Jesus said the Word is Truth. Thessalonians says those who don't love the truth aren't saved and everyone who doesn't believe the truth will be dammed.

Todd, do you believe all Scripture is given by inspiration of God? Do you believe there is parts of the Scripture you can deny and still be saved?

Todd, please answer the question I asked you. How much of the Word can one deny before you consider them not a Christian?

Thank you

Hi Alec: since the day of vengeance is future in your thinking it is eschatological just like various tribulation scenarios are future.

This day of vengeance has an interesting environment that it is placed in, do you know what those might be?

In keeping with the thread topic, the necessity of injecting a gap wherever scripture is difficult to grasp looks more like an act of fear than it does a revelation by the Spirit of God concerning the text.

Is the Spirit of God revealing a gap in the Lukan narrative? Is the Spirit of God revealing a gap in the Mosaic narrative?
I personally don't interpret the scripture with such a necessity to inject a gap, I do see old earthers need that gap to install 'scientific theory' as the foundation for it's hermeneutic in Genesis.

Since that gap is offered as an eschatological fix for the Lukan text and serves as a uniter to meld agnostic/atheist scientific theory with scripture what in all of that pressures me into a change of interpretation?

Some might ask "Why color the science behind earth origins with atheist/agnosticism"? Because when those scientist use the philosophy of Philosophical Naturalism as the basis of scientific inquiry I know from the outset Divine revelation has been rejected outright, therefore the scratch and claw to force materialistic answers into their theories poisons it from the outset.

Old earthers are bed-fellows with evolutionists simply because they cannot extricate the philosophy behind the science. It takes a man of God, one who will not deny the word of God to bring forth the realities in God's creation.

In this sense I am a presuppositionalist, I will not attempt to use man to validate divine revelation. Divine revelation validates the conclusions of men.

I edit to add...for this very reason the creation of the world is received in an act of faith and trust in the Creator God. When faith is jettisoned for the rationale of ungodly men, we serve the body of Christ with husk and bone, they starve for authoritative word of God. But those who are deceived by their vain servings think they have done the body of Christ a great service and to their confusion receive applause for starving their audience.

so, i dropped my popcorn and decided to respond (metaphorically)

so get this, i believe that the universe is billions of years old.
i also believe that the world is almost 10,000 years old. or maybe it could be in the millions.
i also believe there was a big bang, (when God said let there light, the voice reverberated the cosmos and now we have the universe we live in)
i also believe that God created the universe out of nothing.
i also believe that God created the universe out of matter that already existed.
i believe that the earth is flat just as much as it is round.
(a guy was wearing a t-shirt that said the earth was flat before it was round, i found that funny)
i believe in science, i believe in the spiritual realm that was made through Christ that science can't explain.

funny hey.

all jokes aside,

i was talking with a mentor of mine, we were talking about the beginning of the universe, the characteristics of God, the gospel, etc.

he then looked at me and said, better for a man not to have been born when talking about the beginning of the universe, or the characteristics of God, why? he asked. looked at me, i didnt know so i shrugged, then he said, because, when were standing in the council of God being judged, he said, God would kick you in the pants because you dont do anything practical other than talking about these things, sure there nice, but what are you doing about these things? whats believing in the age of the universe going to do for you? what good is it? sure you can know the attributes of God, but what does it do for you, ya its good for your personal walk, but does it help feed His sheep?

i mean, look at your posts already, what good is it? some people are deciding others salvation because of what they believe... no one in this forum can decide those things, they were predestined (or foreknew , w.e your theology) we know how salvation comes to us. salvation is done through the work of the Trinity and them alone, not the Trinity and some guys in the forum. They decide, we can either build or tear, and seems like there's a lot of tearing each other down because of the 'age of the earth'

i mean, using scripture to 'dictate' like its a sword to your own family...

Elijah-

It is obvious we are talking past each other.

Obviously a person must repent and surrender and place their faith in Christ to be saved.

But you said a person must also believe every scripture as written to be saved.

The problem with that is twofold: first the Bible makes no such claim about itself, and second, two persons can truly believe the same exact scripture but understand it very differently.

//When faith is jettisoned for the rationale of ungodly men,//

What rationale (science) are you willing to accept? Why would you trust science in some vital areas but not others?

The Bible does not discuss scientific matters so how do you know which science to accept as true?

I am not beholden to all science (Eg, I think global warming is a fraud) but at some point given all the progress and discovery and development that is proceeding at an exponential rate you have to agree that science works.

By the way, Christians like radiometric dating etc when it supports something they want to be proven.

There is no need to jettison any faith to accept objective truth. Truth is truth.

//, I have never (yet) met a Christian who did not believe the day of vengeance (or the days of vengeance in Luke 21:22) were not synonymous with our Lord's Second Coming.//

In the Isaiah passage I believe the reference is to Christ sacking the powers of darkness at the cross. But of course that is a whole other discussion.

Hi Dan you quoted your mentor: "he then looked at me and said, better for a man not to have been born when talking about the beginning of the universe, or the characteristics of God, why? he asked. looked at me, i didnt know so i shrugged, then he said, because, when were standing in the council of God being judged, he said, God would kick you in the pants because you dont do anything practical other than talking about these things, sure there nice, but what are you doing about these things? whats believing in the age of the universe going to do for you? what good is it? sure you can know the attributes of God, but what does it do for you, ya its good for your personal walk, but does it help feed His sheep?"

Dan: Tell your mentor from me that pragmatism is not the litmus test of whether a subject is important or not. There is more to our faith than simply 'what works for me' thinking.
Because I have these kinds of discussions, does that imply I don't evangelize? Does it imply I don't do other things in keeping with God's word? I hope your mentor is not so shallow as to judge all discussions he doesn't prefer as un-preferable to everyone else?

Maybe you should get a new mentor, because the value of God's truth is important in ways we cannot see; pragmatism does not even scratch the surface of the need for truth in our generation.

Maybe instead of my criticism of his mentoring you can ask him this. Read these verses...Phil 4:8 Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just,whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy””meditate on these things. 9 The things which you learned and received and heard and saw in me, these do, and the God of peace will be with you.

Is it noble to believe God's narrative on creation? Is it noble to defend the truth of it? Is it just to believe what God says over man's teaching? Is it pure to desire truth in the inward parts...even if that truth is knowledge of God's creation? Is it a good report to adhere to the counsel of God over against the multitudes of liars that peddle falsehoods?
We at SI are perfectly justified to discuss, debate, think over, critique, examine and refute one anothers beliefs and seek to obtain the truth. In doing this we are following Pauls injunction to 'think on these things'.

Your mentor had decided that parts of scripture are unworthy to think upon because they seemingly don't benefit him, but what about others?

His counsel is less than biblical, though I am sure he probably meant well.

Lastly Elijah is not kicking anyone out of the kingdom, but he is right about one thing...denial of scripture is dangerous to the soul. Yes, we have varying interpretations, but his warning is not wrong.

In this context we are discussing earth origins...and for some its a snore and a who-cares subject. But what if its a salvation by grace issue? Should we treat it the same? Maybe some do treat it the same...then in that very moment when we tell them they are in danger of hell we are guilty of "deciding others salvation" because they have erred from the faith.

Hey Marvin-

I have a question for you. I’ve asked others this and I am not sure I have received a reasonable response.

What evidence would it take for you to accept that the earth/universe is ancient?

The answer I usually get is "that will never happen” or "there will never be such evidence.”

But I ask you to use your imagination- is there anything that would convince you short of the Creator telling you?

I ask this partly because you said believing in a 6000 year old earth is a matter of faith. I am not sure if this means you would refuse to accept even the most clear and convincing evidence. I am willing to concede that we may not have absolutely clear and convincing evidence but it is pretty close:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_against_a_recent_creation

Todd, rationalwiki is a site that mocks christians.

Hi Todd: At first I thought I was going to end up doing a lot of reading, so when I read the anti-creation nonsense I decided to look at who is willing to spend that much time serving up such a buffet of anti-Christian rhetoric...and just as I guessed...

Rationalwiki...

Our purpose here at RationalWiki includes:
1.Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement;
2.Documenting the full range of crank ideas;
3.Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism;
4.Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media.

I could say anything and this bunch would find a way to drag up some science to refute it.

There is no clear refutation in all of that, it's pure atheist propaganda designed to silence any scientific questioning outside of their atheist religion.

What would it take to convince me? Clear revelation teaching in scripture the earth is old and Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 are all poetic.

Scripture interprets scripture, not atheist-rationalist nonsense packaged in science jargon and unquestioned philosophical naturalism.

Lastly The writer to the Hebrews says creation is a matter of faith. Heb 11:3 By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

This is exactly the opposite of the webpage you posted to review. Everything they declare has its origins from some material thing, its origins are a succession of changes over a great expanse of time ( evolution) what we see is what has morphed into its current state from some other material state previous.

The human/atheist/skeptic/agnostic/carnal mind MUST have a rational god-less explanation of what exists. When Christians follow suit by following after the blind and dead men rejecting god via their 'science and reasoning' the Christian is being deceived by one of the religions of modern Babylon...'scientism'. These are simply offering another religion...a modern day Baal, a modern day RA, a modern day idol.

I am not anti-science to refuse atheist propaganda, I am not anti-science to kick evolution to the curb. I am not anti-science to take a different view of their findings.
You must remember...they are not offering simple observation and test-tube results they are offering an atheist/skeptic answer to the existing world. They have a worldview that overshadows all things. Their metanarrative has only one true God and that is themselves.

brother marvin,
thank you for the time to address what i said.

you could be right, but he is 92 so if his pragmatism throws anyone off, its because hes in the late stages of ecclesiastes, you know, the whole nothings new under neath the sun, or maybe he means to be how the book ends,

The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.

and since he has been around so much, maybe he knows and understands the teachings of how paul says,

we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ

and those verses seem to be action type verses, despite the bad hermeneutics if thats something someone could criticize, but maybe thats what hes pragmatic about, speculation...

but alas, peoples lives do get enriched by talking about these things, its just you know, for someone like me,

it reminds of when i would sit down town and talk with people, and how much some people can go on and on about differing topics. i would even share my opinions and what not, but they would always try one up me, i usually just listened though. eventually it would just become an endless cycle of information talking, after they were all talked out, theyd sit there quietly and then share how come they knew so much information, and turns out a lot of those people were children of pastors, teachers, elders in church but they turned away from God because those people they learned all those topics from didnt love them, or accept them, those people in authority threw these kids (which were adults that were usually older than me) so they became bitter and became apologists (probably using this word in the wrong context) of what they believed in. but after all was said and done, theyd often looked surprised at me or ask how come i didnt try 'battle' them and i just said, to me, Jesus seemed like He listened to the people He was with, and loved them.

those are actions that speak louder than words,
feeding his sheep seem more practical...

thats all

Thanks Marvin but you did not really answer my question- particularly what science DO you accept?

Do you accept that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second and that the sun is 93,000,000 miles away? If so, why? There is no scriptural revelation about such matters. How do you know that some atheistic conspiracy is not covering up the true figures?

I understand that the rational wiki site has a bias in favor of hard science, but sites like reasons.org have similar listings of evidence. Hugh Ross and his staff are not atheists.

I do understand that the sole purpose of some scientists is to bash Christianity or in a broader sense the belief in God. But surely that is the motivation of a very small minority of scientists. In other words, there is no need to assign atheistic motives to the great majority of persons doing scientific research. I think that is an unfair broadbrushing that Christians use when they dont like the result of a certain scientific discovery.

I guess my point is that I am in a quandary about how certain folks trust and accept and use thousands and thousands aspects of scientific advancement but simply "turn off” when it comes to scientific discoveries re cosmology, astronomy, etc.

Hey Alec-

Not sure what point you are trying to make. There are in fact canals/canyons(huge ones) on Mars and they have already found Dinos with feathers. https://globalnews.ca/news/2116716/new-feathered-dinosaur-fossil-unearthed-in-china/

Mars rocks have been dated to be be about 4.2 billion years old via testing performed by the Curiosity rover. The fact that we actually have such a rover performing such high tech tasks on a planet 33.9 million miles away is incredible. We can trust the science that got it there but not the results of its experiments? That also is incredible.

I know that this topic has been discussed at length several times on Sermon Index. However, I would also like to inject that the topic doesn't have to be approached from an "either/or" perspective. It is possible that the Earth is both old and young at the same time.

During one of the previous discussions, I wrote out a couple of long posts. Ultimately, I opted not to submit the second post that detailed a possible scenario.

My non-submitted post focused upon pondering the perspective of the viewer of the Genesis account in conjunction with understood notions about special relativity and the relationship between "time" with relative space.

In a nutshell, I pointed out the known issues related to the "big bang" -- in which physicists believe that all known matter (and mass) of the universe was contained within a singularity and sort-of exploded with a magnitude never seen before. Scientists believe in a "big bang" largely because they can triangulate and map the direction that the universe moves away -- going all the way back to a single point.

A black hole is a place in space that is so massive (*literally -- a great mass) that light cannot escape (despite its incredible speed). There is no "escape velocity" once something has crossed the point of no return near that black hole (referred to as an "event horizon") because the gravitational pull from the bend in space-time caused by that mass is overwhelming to, well, even light.

Escape velocity on Earth is 11 km/s (kilometers per second). This isn't particularly strong because the Earth (compared with more massive outer planets) just doesn't have a corresponding gravitational pull any greater than what is caused by the Earth's mass. The "escape velocity" of more massive planets is, of course, greater because of the greater mass of those planets.

A "black hole" is so massive that not even something as fast and light-weight (light have almost no mass whatsoever) can escape.

So, what was the "escape velocity" of light when the entire mass of the entire known universe was contained in one place at what even scientists often refer to as the "creation" of our universe? It was almost infinite. Instead of light needing to travel 186,000 miles/second (its current known speed), it had to have exceeded that during the initial days of the big bang -- and exponentially so!

What does this have to do with time?

Relativity teaches us that time and space are relative. Physicists argue that time behaves differently -- at different "timing" intervals -- near a black hole versus further away from it.

What would the first "day" have been like in a much smaller "known" universe? By the way, a "known universe" is what scientists can study, measure, observe, etc. Our galaxies didn't move in an empty mass. Rather, the universe is "expanding" uniformly with all of the mass -- space, galaxies, stars, planets, light, etc. -- within it. On the outside is "unknown" to them.

The first "day" would have been -- to the inside observer -- incredibly different from an outside observer because light (with a constant speed limit) would have traveled an incredible distance during the initial "bang" of the "big bang." We know this because mass had to expand and light didn't have far to travel (given that mass was initially contained to a small singularity). The universe was much larger by the second "day" -- but still much, much smaller than what we measure and observe today. It hadn't expanded very far. So, light (and TIME) would have again seemingly traveled faster and time would have been relative to the perspective (inside or outside).

Repeat this for six days. The known universe is measured to be about 13.8 Billion years old. However, this is because of what physicists believe they know about the nature of light (its velocity) and observation of the universe. However, if the universe was microscopically smaller during the initial moment of the big bang, then time moved much "faster" compared with someone from a different relative perspective. This is interesting because things "aged" faster -- at the "billions of years" rate versus the days that transpired for someone watching creation from a different relative position.

This is a very brief explanation of what physicists call "time dilation." This is just one different way to look at Creation and the age of the universe.

Physicists don't approach time dilation from the perspective of finding a "relative" age of the universe because we (and the laws of physics that we are confined to) are contained within the "known universe" and the physical laws that they study. The alternate perspective would raise issues "unknown" universe.

This is interesting to me. It also causes me to remember Paul's proclamation at Athens regarding the "Unknown God."

I hope that this doesn't offend anyone or cause them to point the finger of "heresy" at me. I am not even endorsing this as "truth" either. It is simply a comparison of what we know from the Word of God about the six days of creation versus what physicists observe from the known universe (but only from this trapped position in space-time). I am fully aware that God is not at all confined by physical laws.

I apologize for the somewhat short length of this post given its complexity. I typed quickly too and don't have any time to edit it. I would add one last thing: I don't think that it even matters. What matters is to know Christ. I trust in the Lord and know that He is -- the "I Am" -- and He is not confined by time or my limited understanding of it.

Hey Chris- I like it!

I for one do not think you are a heretic or even doomed to hell.

One thing I wasn’t clear about is where you think the "observer” was positioned in Genesis 1? In other words, Genesis 1 is reported from what perspective?

Also , is there objective evidence that light slows down or speeds up near a black hole?

Hi Todd: Rational wiki is not hard science it is scientific data construed to prove a godless, atheist worldview.

I am not a compartmentalizing loon, I realize I use technology that came by way of various scientific disciplines...electrical, mechanical, hydraulic etc. When I turn the lights on, this is not an electrician telling me "now you know electricity evolved from cave-men rubbing their feet on mammoth rugs and touching one another".
In short, scientific advances in technology are not packaged with 'you must now conclude as we do, religion is a coping mechanism and its a apart of our evolution as a species". This is what is fed our school children when 'science' classes are done, its an indoctrination...not an exploration into physical aspects of our world. True, some dissect a frog and learn from that...which is great, but then they tell you the frog came from something which came from something else.

Since science proper has been hijacked by the real lunatic fringe which (like Dr Dawkins) use to attack Christianity, I realize that on a huge scale all of science is biased toward its own philosophical naturalism and remains so.

When I get a big-bang theory...I realize I am dealing with someone who does not believe Genesis as it is written, but has subscribed to modern scientific theory.
Genesis shows a sequential appearing of plants, animals, sun and moon and stars...then man. The big bang and all other science that issues forth from that theory are lock step requiring me to jettison Genesis in favor of their theories. I cant adopt them.

These same men are lock step in all other scientific disciplines...there is no soul, there is no spiritual, there is no miracle, there is no God, there is no heaven or hell, all there is to be known is material...therefore only the material can tell us about the realities of our world. This is Philosophical Naturalism. I despise it and refuse it.

In short, a cell phone with the technology behind it is no propagandist for atheism. But, those in the fields of science who are atheists 'by reason of their lack of evidence for God' I will not allow them to teach me, instruct me, in anything where their science is used to undermine and teardown the word of God.

So, yes I turn the lights on utilizing scientific advancement...and yet anathematize any so-called scientific advancement that propagates materialism as its operating mode of life.

This subject is the frontal assault on the bible.

Why? Because to undermine Genesis does away with God, miracles, the reliability of scripture narrative, the literal events of scripture testimony and the credibility of the biblical writers.

In one fell-swoop to do in Genesis is to do in all the above...
it is no wonder
atheism, skepticism, agnosticism, humanism are all in an advanced state of power in our schools and colleges.
it is no wonder our churches cannot operate by the authority of God's word, we need a scientific panel to approve what we believe.
It is no wonder the scriptures are always in question because Christians here, at our Churches and in our pulpits adhere to the nonsense believed here. God doesn't honor it because they don't honor his word.

For some the best thing to do is join the ostrich-Christian club...and duck your head in the sand when someone says YEC or OEC. For them, they have as I have repeatedly said, denied the Spirit of God can reveal the truth of Genesis to them, they have believed the lie that they need an atheist scientist to do that job for them.
I cast him out like a devil.

"Hath God said" worked in Genesis and it works on this website too, it works on all websites because it works in the hearts of men.

But, should I take "Hath God said" analogically or poetically or figuratively or as hyperbole? I take it as a literal fact.

I will make this very plain...the modern man uses science as a vehicle to push both philosophy and ideology. Do you think cell-phones is simply a technological advancement? It is on one level, the other level has a great deal of spiritual devilishness to it. Time wasting, gossip, false teachings, sexual fantasy and many many other things. Technology is a vehicle for the propagation of the vastly more destructive philosophy and ideologies of our day.

Science is just like that cell-phone...it has its practical uses but it's used by the princes of darkness to spread their lies. You cannot extricate the cell phone from its intention...but so many think because it's just a 'phone' its harmless. So, science is supposed to be harmless, but its a vehicle for devilish lies and deceptions.

By the way, I also realize that the more I strongly hold to an opinion the less and less there is of any discussion or interaction, it reduces to 1 or 2 that might post. In short, I get it that I am a thread killer. This is the common finale to most any thread I engage in.

If you think I should be 86'd...send your vote to Greg.

//Why? Because to undermine Genesis does away with God, miracles, the reliability of scripture narrative, the literal events of scripture testimony and the credibility of the biblical writers. //

This is s gross overstatement. I believe in every miracle described in the Bible. I can’t speak for all old earther Christians but I suspect the great majority of them do as well.

I see no justification at all for your statement.

Even though I’m an old earther I still believe in the miracle of creation.

Thanks alec for the kind reply, I take that as a vote to stay.

"let there be light"...as I understand scripture, that light seems to have been God's own light of his presence.
When it comes to natural/created light, we get that later in the Sun, stars, moon.

To me, this answers why we can have plant life before the creation of the Sun, because God is life and he imparts it as he wills, in this case his creative word and life bring forth his creation in a sequence the natural world does not answer to. These 'reversals' to our understanding of natural things are signs of God's working. Our scientists who are banking on uniformitarianism will stumble at this.

Hi Brother Todd:

Please allow some freedom to advance a little rhetoric to show how you and I are miles apart in 'belief' concerning God's creations.

You said "I believe in the miracle of creation"

Where is the miracle of morphing from one thing to another? You say you need an old earth, so in getting an old earth you get millions and billions of years to go from one thing to another, from monkey to man, from protoplasm to fish, to lizard to dinosaur etc. You need all that time, those eons to bring forth the creation we have today.
You do not have a miracle you have genetic mutation, you have a process, a random indeterminate chaotic natural turn of evens that fortunately for you and I turned out as a success for humans...pretty bad for shrimp and crabs or sewer rats etc.
You do not believe God created the things that are as they are.
When asked "Todd, do you believe in Genesis creation"? and you say "Yes", then comes the denials...but what day did the Sun show forth it's light? The bible says Day 4, you say "over the expanse of billions of years the sun came forth as the result of a big-bang". But I ask...Brother Todd, that doesn't sound like scripture that sounds like a denial of scripture, rather it sounds like an endorsement for modern evolutionary thinking?
At bare minimum I believe in the immediate arrival of a Sun by the declared word of God, you say "no, over the expanse of billions of years the Sun came forth as a result of unknown processes we are still looking into".

My rhetorical questioning can continue ad nauseum, but in the end your belief dies the death of a thousand Caveats. What you say you believe is no where near what I believe. Your processes, time frames, morphing and transitioning are not the 'miracles' that God has declared in the bible, miracles in the bible are "naturally non-occurring phenomena".
O.E.C have removed the miraculous creations of God and substituted them with the godless, atheist, empty and unbelieving process, time frames, morphing and evolving matter. In order for to believe as I believe, you will require faith that God has done exactly as he said he has done. You believe it for your salvation and place your dependence upon Jesus doing exactly and precisely as it is written in scripture to secure your salvation, but here, you say one thing and believe another.

Brother, this is rhetorical...not intending to be harsh or mean toward you.
But this is how I see it and how I believe we are greatly different in what and how we believe in a 'miraculous creation'.

Dan: Thanks for the kind reply.

In a venue like this, I take advantage of the readership, the questions and the assertions made. I am willing to 'battle' and as you've read I do so. But, not every venue is the same, when I street witness I don't 'battle' it out, when I counsel, when I pray with my brothers or when I am teaching young believers I don't 'battle' there either. In some study groups there is freedom to engage in debate or questions and there I will share my thoughts as I do here, but only because I am in an atmosphere were I can do so.

I personally do not care 1 iota about one-uping anyone, I do care about Jesus being rightly known and loved and his word known and rightly believed in lived. Because of that, what I am passionate about gets reduced to claims of one-upsmanship.

But this one thing I do, I resist error, I hate lies and deceptions, I seek to expose falsehoods and bring to the light every false way. In doing so, I make way for the introduction of that which is pure, that which is godly, that which will stand the test of time and trial. It is never ever easy to have been given by God such a concern and willingness to confront the enemy.

I understand getting older and getting less interested in 'specifics' of doctrine, for what it's worth I have mellowed a lot over the years.

Marvin-

I have said at least 10 times- maybe 25 times- in discussions on this topic that I do not believe in evolution. I absolutely do not believe it.

Why do you keep saying that I do?

Todd, evolutionary theory has nothing to do with rocketry. "Evolution" did not send the Curiosity rover to Mars.

I just don't get why people think evolutionist/ atheist scientists are the only reliable, unbiased source of information.

And Todd, I have to say, if you trust some scientists about the age of the universe, why do you not also trust them when they say we descended from a single cell organism (which arose from inanimate material)? I thought these guys knew what they were talking about?

Nothing to do with trust- I just believe they are dead wrong about evolution.

I certainly don’t trust them about the nonsense of global warming or climate change.

Why don't you trust them? They are "experts".

Hi Todd: Well, I am surely not trying to be obnoxious to you. In my way of thinking, Old earth necessitates evolution because there is no reason to conclude the necessity of such an old earth age unless it is to accommodate the theories available from materialist/naturalist conclusions. Every conclusion from them points toward gradual progressive change and adaptation. We are not talking just dog breeds, but one thing becoming something else entirely.

If I open my bible ask an O.E.C. what day man was made, he could not in good conscience say it was the 6th day, he doesn't know what day, or actually when in the scheme of things man was created. He must pay homage to modern godless theories and derive an answer from their conclusions.

This is something I teach my new believers from the outset, the word of God is the final authority, it is not the final authority because a group of men decided it was so, nor is it outdated or failing because other men decided it was so. God has declared his word will stand forever and that we will be judged according to this word. As Elijah said earlier...I paraphrase, how much of the word of God can you disbelieve and be faithful to God? To all the word we should be faithful, Genesis is just one part.

Let me be plain O.E.C only mouths a faithfulness to Genesis, their faithfulness is in direct proportion to their willingness to believe God above the conclusions and theories of men.

I don't know what was under the surface of the deep or how long the deep had been there. I do know what Genesis says is overpowering everything else and if God says there was light the forth day then by He who created all things for Him and by Him, "The Word", who is Jesus Christ. There was light the fourth day period. God is the only One who can make a day a thousand yrs. If you use this for old earth, then why day and night even mentioned? A night and a day are 24 hours, at least as long as I have lived.

Genesis is perfect 6 days of creation, and God rested the 7th day.

God is the only one who can change my mind, and He has not for fifty three years of my seventy eight.

In Christ: Phillip

//Well, I am surely not trying to be obnoxious to you. In my way of thinking, Old earth necessitates evolution because there is no reason to conclude the necessity of such an old earth age unless it is to accommodate the theories available from materialist/naturalist conclusions. //

That is very much like saying that the only reason to believe that Loch Ness exists is to have a place for Nessie to live. Sounds ridiculous, I know.

But Loch Ness exists whether Nessie is there or not.

If the universe and the earth are ancient, it has nothing to do with evolution. It doesn’t "cause” evolution. Of course I will agree that evolutionists need billions of years to try to make their theory work (it still doesn’t) it seems a little desperate to discount something as true (or possibly true) because you don’t like a potential outcome of that truth.

The existence of the ocean means that people will drown and be eaten by sharks. My distaste for those outcomes is not a viable or logical reason to deny the existence of the ocean.

You would be more convincing, at least to me, if you stuck to the evidence for a young earth as opposed to throwing in the red herring of evolution which does nothing to prove or disprove the age of the earth.

Folks who insist that the earth must be young because they are afraid that an old earth supports evolution always sound a little panicky to me.

This thread has blown of and I have not even contributed once!

I have problems with old earth because of articles such as this and because of the bible. I believe the bible to be the word of God in areas of Creation, Science and History!

Why the big bang was not the beginning
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731690-700-why-the-big-bang-was-not-the-beginning/

I actually read alot of scientific journals!

As christians people who believe in a old earth cosmos struggle with this type of article or books such as
Lawrence Krauss book a Universe from Nothing

Lawrence Krauss - A universe from Nothing
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothing-Lawrence-M-Krauss-ebook/dp/B00838F4IE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528368845&sr=8-1&keywords=a+universe+from+nothing

"Virtual” universes””namely the possible small compact spaces that may pop into and out of existence on a timescale so short we cannot measure them directly””are fascinating theoretical constructs, but they don’t seem to explain how something can arise from nothing over the long term any more than do the virtual particles that populate otherwise empty space.

Krauss, Lawrence M.. A Universe From Nothing (p. 164). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

My problem is that the actual science of say
Inflation or what model of the Big Bang do you use! As there are many!

My problems with Big Bang cosmology is the actual science such as Population 3 Star Problem and things like Structured Galaxies and the Horizon Problem!

Big Problems with the Big Bang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOkUM2BQpmI

Big Bang cosmology is problematic as it goes against the order of creation in the bible !

--------------
This subject is the frontal assault on the bible.

Why? Because to undermine Genesis does away with God, miracles, the reliability of scripture narrative, the literal events of scripture testimony and the credibility of the biblical writers.

------------------
I agree !

Charles Lyell’s hidden agenda””to free science "from Moses”
https://creation.com/charles-lyell-free-science-from-moses

By the following year, we see that Charles Lyell has a clear agenda, i.e. to "free the science from Moses”.3 That is what Lyell wrote on 14th June 1830 in a letter to George Poulett Scrope:

I am sure you may get into Q.R. [Quarterly Review] what will free the science from Moses, for if treated seriously, the [church] party are quite prepared for it. A bishop, Buckland ascertained (we suppose [Bishop] Sumner), gave Ure a dressing in the British Critic and Theological Review. They see at last the mischief and scandal brought on them by Mosaic systems … . Probably there was a beginning””it is a metaphysical question, worthy of a theologian””probably there will be an end. Species, as you say, have begun and ended””but the analogy is faint and distant. Perhaps it is an analogy, but all I say is, there are, as Hutton said, ‘no signs of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ … . All I ask is, that at any given period of the past, don’t stop inquiry when puzzled by refuge to a ‘beginning,’ which is all one with ‘another state of nature,’ as it appears to me. But there is no harm in your attacking me, provided you point out that it is the proof I deny, not the probability of a beginning … . I was afraid to point the moral, as much as you can do in the Q.R. about Moses. Perhaps I should have been tenderer about the Koran. Don’t meddle much with that, if at all.

What I find so hard is that most of these people who are old earth creationist have not looked into the science of say Lucy where they used an angle grinder to actually change the bones so that they were upright on a fixed model and maybe something like Stuart Burgess book where he details the design differences between humans and apes and that there is no way that apes could become humans because they have four feet and hands compared to humans who are bipedal

To me it is the overwhelming aspect of DNA and Epigenetics which is the software for the DNA code, which gives no mechanism for the evolutionary process.

Also as I did Chemistry and Physics when you are calculating things such as half lives for maybe carbon dating you assume that there was zero particles at the beginning and that it was a closed system. You assume that the radiation has been constant and that there has not been a flood or a water canopy above the earth that would affect things such as radiometric dating or the fact that with two different dating methods on the same rock you get completly different answers or the fact of mount st helens which was when the rock was only 8 years old, the scientist where measuring as billions of years old!

I need time to work through all the questions here
My problem is that believing in old earth denigrates the bible that we are just simply Neanderthals that god decided to breath life into or that there is no historical Adam, so there is no death before the fall. So when you see Fossils that can only happen through catastrophe not through millions of years of evolution. If we do not believe in Genesis should we believe in the destruction of Jericho or the Second Coming!
Dom

Who here has suggested there was no historical literal Adam? Certainly not I.

And no one else has- so why do you bring this up??

Speaking of the Mars Curiosity rover there is supposed to be some sort of a major announcement today at 2pm EST. I’m curious!

I heard that they discovered some Martians who are communicating that they evolved from humans to Martians billions of years ago.

They promised to take them to their library and show them their history books written by their great martian scientists who are experts in their field. They were written millions of years ago.

I can't wait to order one through the Mars Amazon network!

I'm curious!

See you when I get back from my vacation to Jupiter.

The only problem is that humans were only here 6000 or so years ago so the math doesn’t work.

What y’all going to do when they announce they’ve found life or signs of life? Might not be today but it’s coming in the not too far distant future.

Well I am no advocate for advanced alien life but it seems microbes are just as problematic (not to me, but to some folks) because life is life. If nothing else it would affirm the Bible does not tell us everything, but we already know that.

If there is life on Mars or elsewhere God put it there for His purposes.

Hi todd: I think you hit the nail on the head. The skeptic/agnostic atheist cannot accept that this world was made for the habitation of man and the meeting place of God and man. In order to dismiss that idea, a lot of varied and complex theories are generated. No God, no supernatural, no miracle, no afterlife, no truth to biblical narratives. With those falsehoods anchored in their soul they proceed to undermine the whole world with the vanity of their minds.

I fully believe in both man and the world that was created for him. Eden created as the meeting place for man and God, now Jesus Christ superseding that by living in man and man living in God. Yet all of this is dependent upon the veracity of scripture. Modern science simply says..." this ancient myth is a coping mechanism, designed to answer ignorant men before we scientist came along and solved the problems of fire, water and weather".

It does all funnel into the living faith one has in the testimony of scripture.

As a YEC I don't have answers for every science question that comes my way; yet, I have found this modern science has no ability to solve mans problems, even when it has nuclear power...all it can do with it is find ways to blow himself up. He cannot fix himself, he cannot do anything but live like the sinner he is. At the end of the day, modern science is just idolatry packaged in a form that suits the modern mans reasoning. It is no different than Baal, our culture bows to it and has built the culture around the worship of it.

As a Christian I see this clearly, I recognize babylon

But taken to your logical conclusion it would seem old order Amish are the only ones doing things right- at least from a technology/science standpoint. But of course they come up with schemes to bend the rules.

It is sonething to wonder how technologically advanced we would be had Adam not sinned. I assume it would beyond imagination but who knows.

"What y’all going to do when they announce they’ve found life or signs of life?"

Same thing as when they told us they'd found intermediate fossils!

"Might not be today but it’s coming in the not too far distant future."

I'll be sure to mark this as yet another false prophecy!

Hi Todd: It might be best if you would, lay out for me how you see your position fulfilling the miraculous creation as declared in scripture. You've probably done this in previous posts over the years, but I don't know your specifics. Could you elaborate?

I pretty much believe the Genesis account I just think it compresses the time. I just think the creation of the universe happened a long time ago at God’s command and then at a more recent date God created animals and humans. But I do not believe humans coexisted with dinosaurs unless there were a very few stragglers left. Crocs are essentially dinosaurs. I believe in a literal garden of Eden and literal Adam and Eve and a literal fall. I believe in a literal but probably local flood (but it may have been worldwide) and I don’t believe dinosaurs were on the ark. I am not sure how to explain other flood accounts that predated Genesis like the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are other very ancient flood stories in various cultures.

I believe animal and plant death occurred prior to the fall (eg animals ate plants) and I believe that the death spoken of that resulted from the fall was human spiritual death although obviously humans died physically after the fall.

I am not sure what to do with very ancient sites like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and where they fit in the Bible narrative. Not sure what to do with very primitive "cave men” and Neanderthals and where they fit in the narrative because per the Bible man was pretty advanced from day one.

I’m just rambling but to summarize I believe God spoke the universe into existence and Genesis 1 is a cliff notes version of what that entailed.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/05/29/discovery-reptilian-mammal-fossil-could-rewrite-history.html

When you read the article, have a read of the comments as well. You will see what I am talking about, where atheist, skeptic and agnostic use this sort of thing as 'good as gold' to further evolutionary claims.

Notice the condescending remarks to anyone not buying into evolution, notice the jargon tossing and pretended knowledge that evolution is a proven fact. Yet, when the research is done, you find these commenters are as ill informed as any cultist is about the bible, they take what the want and manufacture the rest.

This is exactly the same trough that O.E.C. drink from and then offer it to me as if its 'good as gold'.

The article is a dead end for 'transitional species' but it serves as a talking point for so many of our college students and graduates. This is the strangest thing, but so true to human nature...they relish the idea that we came from some fish or rat, yet find it repulsive for someone to believe we were made in the image of God.

Those comments show the battle field for the minds of a generation. But, as I have often said...here at SI, nothing is worth dying for, Kay sara sara whatever will be will be.
Who cares about old earth and new earth, who cares about the Genesis question? We love Jesus right? Really? maybe we do maybe we dont, but one thing is certain, those atheists will not hear an authoritative and convincing word from Christian who does not believe what the scripture teach.

someone will say "Just live out the love of God". yes, do, but dont be a dummy about what they believe, why they believe it and have something to offer besides "now Dr so-and-so says".

As I see it, if you never intend to confront the errors spoken through so many...tell me again just how your silence and well-wishing is going to help them?

Marvin for some reason I could not see any comments but I am sure they are as you describe. You see atheistic liberal comments on any article that allows comments. On CNNs main page 80% of the articles are devoted to Trump bashing in the guise of "news.”

I still think you are grossly exaggerating what a belief in OE does. It does no damage whatsoever to the way I view the rest of scripture, the gospel, etc.

I’ve said before that it doesn’t matter to me how old the universe is. I am just not a fan of OE Christians being branded as scripture denying liberal evolution accepting heretics. It’s crazy but there is more sympathy toward flat eart believing Christians than for OE believers. I suspect this is true because a flat earth belief is so ridiculous that it’s proponents can be patronizingly patted on the head with the comment "that’s so cute.” But OE evidence is not so easily dismissed and for some reason it strikes fear in certain evangelicals. All I can say to that is "Fear not!”

Hi TMK
"I still think you are grossly exaggerating what a belief in OE does. It does no damage whatsoever to the way I view the rest of scripture, the gospel, etc. "

OE proponents directly contradict this scripture - "For in six days the LORD made THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH, THE SEA AND ALL THAT IS IN THEM, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:11

Also, why would you consider a possible local flood when scripture clearly states that - "the water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that ALL THE HIGH MOUNTAINS EVERYWHERE UNDER THE HEAVENS were covered"? -Genesis 7:19

Something else to think about concerning the "BIG BANG" ....
http://www.icr.org/article/big-bang-biblical

Edited to add-

Also Interesting .... http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ110.html#wp11911539
Although I don't endorse some of his ideas, just interesting takes on a lot of aspects of Creation.

Blessings

//OE proponents directly contradict this scripture//

Not true, but no need to go into all that again. A better way to say it is that they do not believe the days to be literal 24 hr days.

ADD: "But if you will look in the first chapter of Genesis, you will see there more particularly set forth that peculiar operation of power upon the universe which was put forth by the Holy Spirit; you will then discover what was his special work. In Ge 1:2, we read, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” We do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be””certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God." ~~Charles Spurgeon

I am not sure how to explain other flood accounts that predated Genesis like the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are other very ancient flood stories in various cultures.
-------------------------------

Todd have you read them because I have I have read Enimu Elushu and the Epic of Gilgamesh, I have read

Old Testament Parallels (New Revised and Expanded Third Edition): Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Testament-Parallels-Revised-Expanded-Third-ebook/dp/B005UYSOUE/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1528472478&sr=1-9&keywords=near+eastern+text

Because if you read them you will discover lists of Gods aslong as my arm and so much weird things that happen in these stories

The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0691147264/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

--------------------------
It is sonething to wonder how technologically advanced we would be had Adam not sinned. I assume it would beyond imagination but who knows.

Some of our technology is because of a christian worldview science looking for Alien life spending massive amounts of money looking for things that we know according to scripture do not exist or looking at evidence and then getting crazy and prepostarus things, there was a recent article that was in the new scientist that Pluto was formed from loads of massive comets considering that we got the diameter of pluto wrong.

To me Evolutionary science does not develop real science in how God Creatures are made and what are places like Uranus and Neptune like rather than sending another Probe to find life on places like Mars scouring with rovers looking for life. We cant even get out the Solar System. I find it crazy to think that the nearest star system Alpha Centuri it would take 4 light years to get there. Yet we as humans know exactly how the Universe started when we cant even travel to the nearest star or animals like the giant squid alluded scientists for years.

Science Papers can lie, look at how many retractions that happen in scientific papers.
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/03/

I like Science but Science without God as before Lister. People thought that things like Germs spontaneously was created from nothing, before Charles Lyle people did not believe the World was millions of years old.

When we look at fossils you cannot explain fossilisation by millions of years, If you do the calculations it works out that for every 10mm it would take thousands of years to cover a dinosaur toe but yet the fossil is completely preserved. How can a dinosaur be completely covered or any other animal! It is crazy that you have to think like this that every million years you may bury a dinosaur foot if you think evolutionary. This is the difference between creationist and evolutionist.
If a fish dies it goes to the top of the river or ocean it does not get preserved in stone as it need alot of pressure.

Poly strata fossils going between layers causes massive problems for evolution.

Lawrence Krauss even thou is an evolutionist posses so many problems for ALien life such as the laws of physic as how long would it take for life to get here from distant stars. You struggle with Newtons equations and also the Theory of Relativity. You would also need infinite energy to get up to Light Speed, then you struggle with Newtons Equations as a speck of dust is dangerous, it is also interesting the fact that people who have seen so called aliens is that they deny Jesus that all religions lead to God and when people rebuke them in the name of Jesus they disappear.

I believe in a literal worldwide flood because the fossil evidence points to it! As fossils of fish eating fish cannot be produced through millions of years, Dr John Mackay talked about the amount of humans that where found with dinosaurs and were put in warehouses because it disagreed with the evolutionary narrative.

Things like Shark teeth on the highest mountains in the world! I believe the bible when it talks about the world wide flood.

The best one is a place called Goble Teke it is a place in Turkey it is one of the oldest archaology sites but according to evolutionist, stone age man should exist but it is a fully civilised culture! Big problem and the dating is bad for evolutionist!

Hey dom I am not comparing Gilgamesh etc to scripture just pointing out that there are numerous flood stories that predate the writing of Genesis. Because if the flood wiped out everyone except Noah’s family and the story was passed down through them how did these flood stories, disparate but similar in many respects, come to be?

Have you read them

"A better way to say it is that they do not believe the days to be literal 24 hr days."

That is phisically impossible. How could trees grow and bear fruit without the sun, that was only created the next day? Or in OE terms, a few million years later?
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Concerning the global/ local flood issue, the Scripture I quoted -"all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered” - that says it pretty clear.

Please don’t boldly go where the Bible have not gone before ;)

Jbaptist:

Can you see why I resist the idea of turning Genesis 1 into a poem? Because when you do, you can inject any kind of theory, days, milleniums, eons into it depending upon the going modern philosophy of the day.

When Genesis becomes poetry you can go boldly wherever you want, because the boundaries of scripture are (in this case) non-existent.

And there's a benny too!, you get to save face and claim you believe the bible when in fact you do not. All you need do is ask for details and their faith-claims die the death of a thousand caveats.

But is there a cost for being Y.E.C? Yes, big time. You will not be appreciated by the in-the-know scientist of the day. You will not be applauded, or your books given much credence. You will have to wear the reproach of those who 'believe God' over against the seeming 'overwhelming evidence' that the earth is billions of years old, man, plants and animals have been here for millions or billions of years...yet, we only have about 6000 years of actual human history to draw from.

So, take your pick.

//That is phisically impossible. How could trees grow and bear fruit without the sun, that was only created the next day? Or in OE terms, a few million years later?//

You are being very obtuse Joch.

If you seriously want a full explanation of how OEs interpret Genesis 1 go to reasons.org and read about it until your heart’s content. It will answer all your questions about how OE interprets these matters but obviously your mind is closed so why bother?

Why do you care if some Christians (even Spurgeon) believe in an old earth? I am certainly not trying to convince anybody. I am just pushing back against the idea that OECs are evolutionists who deny the gospel and miracles. Even OECs believe in miraculous creation. Remember the "c” stands for creation, not soulless Big Bang.

Frank you must not have read what I wrote here:

//Hey dom I am not comparing Gilgamesh etc to scripture just pointing out that there are numerous flood stories that predate the writing of Genesis. Because if the flood wiped out everyone except Noah’s family and the story was passed down through them how did these flood stories, disparate but similar in many respects, come to be?//

Todd why are you commenting on so called narratives that you have not even read

Where did I say I never read the epic of Gilgamesh? Gee whiz.

Alec wrote:

//Gilgamesh lived somewhere within 2800 - 2500 BC, whereas Moses lived around 1500 - 1400 BC (yes, I know he lived 120 years). Though he wrote the Torah in that time the events of Noah's flood occurred 1556 years after God created Adam---that is, circa 2500 BC which makes it concurrent with the Gilgamesh tale//

This suggests Gilgamesh was alive very soon after the flood ended. Why would his story be so different? I am not disagreeing that the Bible version is the correct one I am just curious how these other things fit in- like Gobekli Tepe etc.

The bible is completely different you quoted Gilgamesh

the more important Enlil, who presided over the affairs of gods and men from his temple on earth, and the clever Ea, who lived in his freshwater ocean beneath the earth (the Ocean Below) and sent the Seven Sages to civilize mankind. Then there were the kindly Mother Goddess, Lady of the Gods, who first created men with Ea’s help, the violent Adad, god of the storm, and the Moon God, Sin, the majestic son of Enlil. The Moon’s children were Shamash, the Sun God, the patron of travellers and Gilgamesh’s special protector, and the Babylonian Venus, the impetuous Ishtar, whose responsibilities were sexual love and war, and whose appetite for both was inexhaustible. Beneath Ea’s watery domain, deep in the Netherworld, the gloomy realm of the dead, lived its queen, the bitter Ereshkigal. There she lay prostrate in perpetual mourning, attended by her minister, the gruesome Namtar, and the rest of her fell household.

Penguin Classics. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics) (p. xxx). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Gilgamesh epic

Compared to Noah

Gen 6:13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth

I can give you other examples from other near Eastern ancient texts as Gilgamesh talks alot about a prostitute to me the bible is unemebellished and very terse compared to any other narritives and the list of god's are crazy in the other epics

I believe god's word as he was there we he created the universe , no other ancient culture believed the world was billions of years old it is only very recent due to Darwin

I believe the bible to be accurate when it says days that it is 24 hours or one day

//you quoted Gilgamesh //

Where did I quote Gilgamesh? I just mentioned it. There are a lot of similarities to the account of Noah- way too much for chance.

I quoted Gilgamesh, it is completly different than the Noah Biblical Story !

Frank do you know all the similarities between the Epic of G and the account of Noah?

Why are you so threatened by the similarities?

I am simply interested in how post flood history played out because we are told exceedingly little about it in scripture.

We know there was a writing about a great flood prior to Moses that talks about gathering animals and some people onto a boat, that water rose and covered everything as far as the eye could see, that birds were sent out to see if there was dry land (dove first, then swallow, then a raven). There are other similarities but obviously a lot of differences.

https://www.gotquestions.org/amp/Gilgamesh-flood.html

Wow! I think I’m having an out of body experience after reading this thread. :-)

The idea of an old universe and biological evolution is an old idea, dating as far back as 1200 B. C. from Hindu literature and spreading to Greek philosophy to the present time.

This lecture by Dr. Paul James-Griffiths will give you a better understanding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqFChgeSJGA

Marvin wrote "If you think I should be 86'd ... send your vote to Greg."

My vote is "Nay."

I liken you to one of David's Mighty Men "who gave him strong support in his kingdom...who helped him in war; mighty men of valor,
men trained for war, who could handle shield and spear...who could draw up in battle formation..:with a perfect heart, to make David king over all Israel." I "hear" your heart for the Body of Christ. Your "joint of supply" is needed.

Be of good courage,

Mary

I’m just rambling but to summarize I believe God spoke the universe into existence and Genesis 1 is a cliff notes version of what that entailed.

Sorry to jump into this thread so late but as I was reading through some of it the idea that was expressed in this thread that I have quoted above struck me as particularly worrisome.

To relegate Gods word to a cliff notes version of the creation of the universe is to open oneself to accommodation to the world spirit of this age. This weakened view of the Bible has destroyed the Bible for the liberal in our country for some time now.

Sadly, we have to say that that it is this accommodation to the wisdom of this age which is, in part, the reason for such weakness in the church in regards to standing against the breakdown of our culture.

In Christ,

"...struck me as particularly worrisome..."

Ron, you see it, Marvin sees it, Frank sees it, others see it...but sadly, Todd doesn't.

Only the mud from the Master can open blind eyes!

//Sadly, we have to say that that it is this accommodation to the wisdom of this age which is, in part, the reason for such weakness in the church in regards to standing against the breakdown of our culture.//

You see it as an accommodation to whatever, I see it as an accommodation to facts.

I will never be threatened by facts (truth). Many are.

Agreed Alec- thanks for your post. I’ll bow out before I get snarkier😉

TMK, I agree. Genesis 1 is by no means a complete chronicle, it is an overview, the vision of a man (moses) who did not have the rich vocabulary we have to describe what happened. They are blanket statements.

Rest of the forum. How on earth did you come to the conclusion that science is what God spoke of when talking about the "wisdom of the world/age? Find any reference to this and you will see he is not talking about science. Why would he? Our battle is not flesh and blood.

I see a lot of conspiracy theory here, that all the worlds scientists are trying to distort peoples view of God. Perhaps they are actually lizard people too?

I've said this before, I feel a very strong sense that a lot of people on this forum equate the word of God with the bible. That is not what was revealed in Christ through the apostle John. Christ is the true WORD.

Why is it imperative to believe in literal six days? Genesis was written by a man moved by the Spirit, a man who sww a vision, a man who was writing to a people who didnt need to know the intricacies of every detail (I doubt moses would have even had the vocabulary himself). He painted it as taking place in six days, and this was pleasing to God.

God gave you minds capable of reasoning, a lot of you fear to excercise what God gave you. Dont your minds belong to God (if you are his)? Isnt the Christ Logos (reason)? The scriptures are to be unto life in Christ, they are meant to direct reason and logic, not to hinder it. But most of you walk on eggshells because you must maintain YOUR belief of an absolutely infallible bible. And it is! In spirit, but there are things we know, things we can conceive of that our ancient brethren could not. Thats basic logic. They did remarkably well, God used the vessels He had, but they were not scientists. It was a different world back then folks, we've learned things they havent. Not evil things, just things they didnt know.

Tyler, I'm just going to say it and not mince words; what you said is heresy. Of course Jesus is the word of God, but so is the Bible.

Brethren, anyone who tries to say the Bible is fallible is trying to undermine your faith and put your confidence in man. The Bible was not written by ignorant iron age shepherds and fishermen, it was written directly by the Holy Spirit. Show me one error.

How arrogant to assume we know more than prophets and apostles; people seem to think that because they didn't have laptops and test tubes back then they were ignoramuses.

Of course the Bible is not a science textbook; it is the way God speaks to us, it's His revelation. But where it touches on science, it is correct.

Read this:
http://www.eternal-productions.org/101science.html

Heresy according to whom? I did not read in the bible where it said the bible was infallible in all matters relating to science. I did not draw that line, other people I do not know did. Sola Scriptura seems to be largely a post Luther phenomenon. Who taught you that the bible was infallible in matters of science? For brother, it was taught you by man and not by God. Id bet my life on it. So who's faith and beliefs are resting in the teachings of man?

You say its arrogant to assume we know more than the prophets and apostles, I say its ignorant to entertain the idea that they knew even a 100th of what we know about this world physically.

For the record I think the description of the creation of the world in Genesis is 100% accurate in its record, I'm simply asserting that it is a broad overview and not a detailed analyzation. "Let the earth bring forth living creatures..." a thousand books could have been written by Moses to describe this natural creation of animals, he chose to sum it up in a few words. It was written for the people of the time. Literally. It has application for us of course but literally Moses wrote it for the Israelites.

The author of Ecclesiastes, Solomon, in all his God given wisdom, still believed the sun rose and set (Ecc. 1:5). This is not a figure of speech, this is where the figure of speech comes from. It was assumed true at that time. Does it now take on a spiritual meaning because we know its wrong but the bible must be true? Or do you admit the author was wrong but was working with the science of the time despite being inspired by the Holy Spirit?

Brother here is a diagram of biblical cosmology as described in the Old Testament.
https://aplanetruth.info/2016/01/21/2533-why-did-the-bible-native-americans-and-all-ancient-cosmology-believe-in-the-firmament-and-water-above/

I did not read this article but it was the best image I could find. Otherwise you can google image "biblical cosmology"

They were wrong. But their point is still made.

"For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." Revelation 22:18,19

"I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food." Job 23:12

"It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds. out of the mouth of God.'" Matthew 4:4

It seems God places a lot of importance on His word. You would do well to do the same.

And by the way Tyler, when you can do more than the apostles and prophets did, I'll listen to your opinion about the Bible.

(I'd post more, but I'm running late for work.)

"It seems God places a lot of importance on His word. You would do well to do the same." - Yes indeed -

Free PDF e-book download -

www.wtsbooks.com/common/pdf_links/9780802865762.pdf

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Resurrection

Martyr: When I look into a source, I must realize they have their own biases...just like Christians do, so when I approach Rational Wiki for their science on creation, I should have a look at their ideas for resurrection as well.

We all agree that Creation has been disputed...but the resurrection? Well, its been disputed too so what do they have to say? "A central tenet of the mainstream Christian faith is that Jesus Christ died and rose again, as we all shall. Unfortunately, there's scant evidence for this."

So, they have no resurrection there's no science to prove it. To them this is tantamount to 'no evidence equals no proof equals no resurrection'. So, If I take Rational wiki as a credible source...there is no way I could be Christian since the whole of the Christian faith sits upon the resurrection of Christ.

Maybe this explanation is overdone, but simply put, their science says no literal six day anything, and it also says 'no resurrection'. If you were taking their science to open the door to a 'old-earth scenario', you can equally take their science to dismiss any resurrection which as Paul said "we are men most miserable'.

Why even argue about creation when the resurrection is dismissed out of hand with 'scant evidence'?

This is why I refuse to use the atheist science to tell me anything pertaining to scripture declarations. Not because I am against science, but because their philosophy behind their science will not admit any realities outside of a materialist answer.

If the bible is no science book in Genesis, it's no science book in Corinthians or the gospels either, therefore whatever spirit of the word is telling that generation, they may accommodate that spirit and interpret accordingly.
In short, what is a resurrection one day is a resuscitation another day, a coma another day, a swoon another day and a faint another day.
How could any of this be a 'sure word of prophecy'? It cant, but that's the real point of such a 'spirit', its to accommodate man's predilections, not God's intentions or will.

Martyr, think for a moment, there are some pretty astute thinkers that post here, telling them they don't think or are afraid of logic is probably a mistake.

Tyler, the link you posted is a flat earth website. That is not an accurate description of the cosmology of the OT.

It is, you can find similar accounts on many many historical and exegitical and even christian websites.

Marvin's new OLD EARTH translation
Translated from the modern scientific hypothesis of the 21st century...revised and updated.

vs 1. In the beginning God created the expansive universe, the energy, matter, light physical laws, uniformitarianism, light and gravity. God then created the earth over the eons of time.
2. There was darkness upon the deep universe so God initiated a big bang, throwing out into the cosmic horizon the multitude of stars and plants; God formed the earth in the eons of eons.
God separated the sky and the seas over the vast eons of time, God brought for the light from the sun and moon the evening and the morning were the first eon-day.
3. Over the vast eons of time continental drift was done by the mighty hand of God, he separated the seas and the land and the evening and morning were the second eon-day.
4. Over the eons of time, God created plants from microbial bacteria and from them came all kinds of plants and vegetation trees, bushes and flowers all producing until they were changed by earthly necessary adaptation. The evening and the morning were the third eon-day
5. God then made man in the eons of time, forming him from the fishes and bacteria of the seas. ( other translations say apes) God made them male, female, trans, gay, bi, queer and so he made man to chose his identity.
The evening and the morning were the eon-days and God did not rest for he had no need of rest, for his work was done by the natural processes of time and chance.

If God actually intended us to believe it was eon-days, millennial days or millions of year-days he could have simply told us. We would have never known any different, the cosmology of ancient men would have understood God as he related himself to man in creation. God is a distant God, winding up the clock of creation he simply makes his clock tick until it does not.

Was the above God's intention in the real biblical account? I say absolutely not, for God could have easily explained to Moses the eon-day account and it would have been for his glory and our good. Yet, this account is not at all what is actually written in the Genesis account.

Frank Turek said "the bible was written from an observation viewpoint". Ok Frank, no problem, but Moses viewed the creation as 24 hour days, Moses was smart he could understand Eons of time if God was intending to convey such time frames. Yet, no such conveyance was had by Moses.
Moses was so intent on conveying a 6 day creation period, we have a 6 day work week because of it, and our calendars, times, days, months, all reflect that 6 day work 1 day rest for millennia now.

If it were eon-days as the Old Earther believe, it would have destroyed the idea of a 6 day work 1 day rest for man as it was for God.
Since God never rested ( not having done 6 days of work) the whole of our sleeping, resting, laboring metanarratives would be absent.

When I create an old earth creation this is what I must consider...That God was completely misunderstood by moses, Moses had no idea of creation, days, time, rest, or actual origins of plants, animals, sun, moon, stars, universe.
In the end, this doesn't strike me as a misunderstanding by Moses, this strikes me as an accomdation to Darwininism and atheist propaganda.

https://www.ligonier.org/blog/age-universe-and-genesis-1-reformed-approach-science-and-scripture/

So you see, there are plenty of reformed folks who cannot believe the scripture anymoreso than the arminians.

hermeneutics 101 scripture interprets scripture.

Hermeneutics failure 101, modern science propagating their atheistic worldview have pieces of information that is useful in helping us interpret scripture.

Hermeneutics abandonment 101, Since Genesis is so stand-alone, we don't trust the simple reading, we need outside atheist/agnostic/skeptic/humanist help to interpret.

Question? Why don't they consider the answers the atheist/agnostic/skeptic/humanist have to offer on the resurrection/deity of Jesus Christ? Because to deny that kicks you of out your teaching spot, to deny the Genesis account brings you open preaching opportunities among those who also have denied Genesis 1 as it plainly reads.

I love the general revelation and special revelation distinction...that is really helpful in making your own interpretation. Problem is, "God made man in his own image" is in the General Revelation section...meaning we have no real boundaries on what that image means and thereby include whatever image our modern day philosophers deem important.

If I had a Ph.D. and or a Masters in something I too would want to protect my credibility in the sight of other Ph.D.'s and advanced education achievers. I know what it feels like to look stupid in front of other sunday school teacher...I'm sure with those degrees looking stupid is never an option.

Geocentrism and Heliocentrism...since our ancients got that wrong, that means by default any biblical interpretation that flies in the face of science is wrong. It means, we cannot be trusted to know what the bible says and what science to accept or dismiss.

When I read that Ligonier article, I see accommodation, I see a way to save face. I see the underlying argument "Christians should leave the real work of making declarations about the world to the secular and the humanist".

I see this as a Satanic ploy buried in theological cautionaries. For humility sake...don't say anything, for the bible sake believe what the professionals tell you.

I say "Get behind me Satan"...as silly, unsophisticated and naïve as that sounds...so be it.

I need to post this on the Ligonier site.

Sorry Marvin but OEC has nothing whatsoever to do with the resurrection. Ain’t never met an OEC who denies the literal factual resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why are you using such straw men? Let s get real.

The Bible teacher I have listened to the most over the years and who has taught me the most about interpreting scripture happens to disagree with me on Genesis 1.

His position is that thus far there is not enough evidence to prove OEC and until that happens he must default to a literal reading.

But at least he uses the word "until” which means he is not blanketedly dogmatic about it. That means if sufficient proof is proffered he will have to change his position. That is all the Ligonier article is saying as well and is the only reasonable position.

I just think there already IS enough evidence but I certainly understand that is a matter of opinion.

Remember, thus far we have only talked about the earth but there are billions of other planets and stars and moons as well that were not subject to a flood of judgment, etc.

It’s pretty hard for me to believe that humans withstood numerous giant meteor impacts and supervolcanoes etc in the past 6000 years. Where is the biblical record of same? They say when the Yellowstone volcano last erupted 600,000 or so years ago it instantly buried bison many states distance away. And that’s just one volcano and says nothing about the extinction level meteor impacts (we can see the craters) over the earths history.

Hi Todd: Pardon the long post. I am dogmatic about it. But I am equally dogmatic about the resurrection, the Deity of Christ, Salvation by Grace, the perfections and love of God.
Since all of these are based upon Scripture and not upon Modern mans opinion, I am in good company with the Martyrs we love to extol and the ancient saints we love to read.

I view the scripture as a whole, I will not surrender Genesis then pretend that I am fully Christian believing "all the word of God".
They have failed where Christ passed the test.
Jesus said man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God".
These have rephrased their beliefs..."we live by every word of man that approves the word of God...this is our bread"

The reasoning is circular...Since modern man refuses the creation narrative as stated, I ask it to confirm the resurrection ( since I am giving credence to their opinions) but their opinions deny the resurrection; for them there is no miracle and no supernatural creating, therefore they can have no miracle of resurrection and no Divinity in Christ or salvation granted on Christ's merits. All of this cannot be factored, quantified, tested, reproduced so they are at a loss to grant me anything other than a closed system materialistic answer. What they offer me with one hand they take away with the other.

God is outside their system, God's miracles are what the world was started with, God's supernatural is how we are introduced to God, it is how we are to know God, the God of the supernatural-creating-loving-fellowshipping kind.

The materialist like the OEC can only offer a God that is non-supernatural, then when confronted with the issue of being branded a heretic by the faithful, they compartmentalize the 'creation' into a model (as the reasons.org website you pasted declared). That model as they clearly stated is called such because they have quantified, tested, reproduced and factored their materialistic explanations. This they have called "God's mode of creation". But it is not, it is merely the theory of man devoid of knowing the supernatural creating God.

Ask how many of those reformed believe in the continuation of spiritual gifts and the God who works in his people by powerful manifestations and supernatural answers to prayer. I dare say "there is scant evidence" for their subscription to the scriptures on that point either.

Show me a man who denies the supernatural in Genesis and I'll show you a man who denies it in practice in the New Testament. But, like many they sign their names to a statement of faith but have no prayer life or faith that demonstrates their belief.

Too harsh? Too dogmatic? Too mean spirited? Never, it's what a normal Christian does in the face of deception and unbelief. We have our own modern versions of denial of the faith, it starts with Denial of Genesis, it continues with Denial of the supernatural working in the believer and ends with Christianity that has made friends with the gods of this present age.

The gods of this present age want their piece of the pie, they want our loyalties to the science that gives them worship, it wants unspoken adherence to axioms and assumptions taught to us by the priests of Babylon (the philosophers of our age) There is a constant clamor for rebuking those who are 'overmuch righteous' and a praise for them who are not willing to die on any mountain of truth, all is relative, all is opinion, all is unsure, all is just a suspicious meta-narrative to be questioned and jettisoned.

I recognize all the aforementioned is the Prince and power of anti-christian human reasoning using theology, philosophy and academic achievement as a wedge to drive it between the believer and his adherence to the word of God.

Satan believes in the God that will damn him to an eternal lake of fire, we modern Christians do not even have a devils faith, we do not have faith in the supernatural (unless its a demonic movie) we do not have faith in the Character of God who cannot lie. Telling me that God made the world in 6 days, then telling me NO...Just kidding it was really millions of eons of days. That's an easy decision to make, I know God and I know if he wanted to tell me precisely what he did to make the earth, sun moon, stars etc he will simply do so. If he made it in eons of ages...I would be absolutely obliged to believe that testimony. Yet, the testimony is simple days and not eons.

I dont have an answer for supervolcanoes, but I dont have an answer for the reason an electing God chose to save a useless sinner like me...but without explanation he did. I can believe what he did based upon nothing but scripture testimony or I can submit my salvation, my election and my imperfect life to the quantification, testing, factoring and reproducing scientific method...what would they tell me?

I utterly refuse to compartmentalize Genesis or the resurrection or the Deity of Christ as if destroying one does nothing to the other. That my friend is the working lie of Satan upon God's people.

Hi Marvin,

You make some very valid points. However, consider the following.

Although there are many academics (e.g., scientists, professors, scholars, etc.) who don't want to appear "stupid" in front of others, I find that the most credible academics are willing to admit that there are things that they simply don't know. "I don't know" is a completely acceptable answer.

After all, the difference between an average college student seeking a degree and a more serious academic is the level of persuasion. What does that mean? Most undergraduate students read a few books and listen to lectures and either regurgitate it for professors on essays and tests OR they actually believe it.

The former is probably the most common. People simply memorize what they're told to memorize without truly understanding it. They only seek a passing grade. The latter is a terrible mistake and simply results in coercion and indoctrination. Such students place their faith in books and men. It is one thing to memorize that 12 x 12 = 144. It is better to understand the concept -- an observation -- that 12 sets of 12 can be combined and be counted and that count will total 144.

Sadly, the former rather than the latter has become the essence and norm for public school and much of undergraduate education. A book, Wikipedia article or a teacher's lesson should not be -- but most often is -- what convinces a student.

A post-graduate education is somewhat different. While there is plenty of "learning" from books and lectures, the emphasis in education focuses on research and observation. Instead of reading about history in a text written by a committee, the student is forced to look at first hand evidence and either prove what they've been taught OR come up with an alternative based upon their own research.

Consider how this works in the Church.

Some churches have become indoctrination centers. Instead of encouraging their flocks to prayerfully read the Word of God and understand it on their own, they are often told what to believe. Churches often set up an official "statement of faith" -- a list of "must believe" doctrines that all members are supposed to embrace. Some of the items on such lists often meander from the indisputable truths of the Word of God into sectarian dogma. Rather than uniting the Body of Christ, such things often tend to divide believers along divisive doctrinal grounds.

Consequently, Sunday school lessons and many teaching sermons in such congregations become no different than the types of educational setting as a college or public school. It often lacks the honest hesitation and real study needed and, rather, results in individuals being led to believe something that they've read (aside from the Word of God) or something that they've been instructed to believe.

Christians should be better than this! As I Thessalonians 5:21 instructs, we should prove (or "test") everything! Our faith cannot be in apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Our faith cannot be based upon books that we read or the "statements of faith" that we've not prayerfully verified through study of God's Word. The Word of God must be our only valid authority in matters of doctrine. After all, this was the basis behind the admonition that the Apostle Paul offered in Galatians 1:6-10. It is also the very thing for which the Bereans were commended for in Acts 17:10-12.

At the same time, there are things that can be understood through observation. There are scientific "laws" in the universe -- derived through observation and proving -- that have led to conclusions. Many of those conclusions are used to contribute to things that are a part of life.

For instance, we are typing on keyboards (physical or touch screens) and looking at words that appear on monitors that are powered by processors that are, in turn, powered by electricity. There are many laws of physics and chemistry that were used in the design of these computer tools. These "laws" aren't contained within the Word of God (at least on the surface).

My wife and I returned on Saturday from a short camping trip to a place near Mt. Shasta. We were excited to spend a few days out in nature and "rough it." During the drive, I was thinking about just how we weren't really "roughing" anything.

We were driving in a modern SUV guided by our GPS. We had a cooler with ice that contained our food. We slept in a tent that was designed to withstand wind and rain. We slept in sleeping bags made from materials that kept us warm during evenings when the temperatures dipped into the 40's. We relied upon our cell phones for communication and weather forecasts (which, in turn, utilized satellite technology). We had powerful flashlights powered by lithium-ion batteries. We even had bathrooms in the park that included hot-water showers!

All of these things owe their development from understood science and physical observation. Moreover, the principles that led to their development aren't found in the Word of God (at least not via direct indication).

What does this have to do with the Genesis account of creation?

Regardless of whether people believe in a literal account or not, the Genesis account doesn't dabble in specifics. For most of human history, such specifics about creation didn't matter anyway. For most of human history, there wasn't much need for any sort of understanding of the observable "laws" of physics.

Over the last few centuries, curiosity peaked in many people. It began with observation of the stars and planets and acceptance of apparent Newtonian laws. This led to academies where men teaching other men in the search for understanding the observable universe.

This leads me back to the topic at hand.

There are reasons why scientists believe in an "old" universe. It is about observation. Over the last century, scientists have determined the speed of light. With that speed in mind (and through observation), they triangulated the movement of entities in the universe. These things allowed them to determine distance. Since that distance is measure in light years (the distance that light would travel in a year), then they determined that observable light had traveled from stars for millions and even billions of years.

Einstein (and others) helped determine the relativity and relationship of things like light, mass, space and time. Their observations -- seemingly verified via many, many experiments -- resulted in discoveries and even inventions before they're invented. For instance, the concept of the atomic bomb was realized long before one was ever tested. This is because scientific law seemed to indicate what would happen by "splitting the atom."

This understanding of the speed of light and how light from extremely distant celestial bodies (so many millions and billions of miles away) has already reached the Earth ultimately led physicists to perceive an incredibly ancient universe. This happened to coincide with what chemists observed regarding the rate of decay and half-life of atoms. It also coincided with what geologists observed in regard to formations that seemingly told the Earth's geological age.

Does this mean that science is right and the Bible is wrong? No.

In fact, let me clearly state that I believe in the literal Biblical account of creation. I don't believe that it is mere hyperbole. I don't believe that it is mere figurative rhetoric. The Word of God -- and the account of Adam and Eve -- was cited by our Lord when he walked the Earth. I believe in the flood of Noah. I believe in every miracle mentioned in the Word of God. After all, I believe in the absolute infallibility of the Word of God.

That said: I also understand WHY scientists have difficulty with believing in the Biblical account of creation. Their observations (and centuries of experimentation) seemingly contradicts it. However, I am also aware of the limitations and "tunnel vision" that often tends to afflict academics.

In my previous post, I mentioned how it doesn't have to be an "either-or" scenario. I believe in a literal six day creation mentioned in Genesis. However, I also believe that it is possible that the account of each "day" in the Bible is relative from the position of the Biblical narrative (the observer) in space-time at Creation -- when all mass of the universe was contained in smaller area and expanding (or fleeing) from God's spoken word. That "day" would be 24 hours from one position in space but billions of years simultaneously from a different position. This is the very thing that "relativity" indicates. So, billions of years could pass by with each day (and much more so for the first day and less for each subsequent day).

Of course, even this is just a theory -- a mere capitulation that combines what I've learned through observable science (and engineering) and the fact that I know that the Bible is absolute truth. It's very possible that this isn't necessarily the case. There are other theories that can explain the apparent discrepancies between the Biblical account of a young Earth and the physical, chemical and geological observation of a much more ancient universe and world. Those things aren't outside of the realm of possibility for me either.

I simply think that it is important to understand why scientists believe as they do. At the same time, I think that it is important to note that -- first and foremost -- the Bible is truth.

"...the church never interpreted the "corners of the earth” to mean that the earth is flat. It is a myth that the church ever believed in a flat earth. As historian Jeffrey Russell shows, that was the view of only a very few odd individuals scattered throughout the last twenty centuries. We use similar figures of speech today. If we say that something is scattered "to the four corners of the earth” we mean "all over the earth.” The convention has always been to talk of four directions, or four compass points””north, south, east and west. Neither we nor the ancients ever took this to mean that there are only four directions in which one can travel. In our modern world we still speak of the "four winds.”

From Answers In Genesis

Read he full article here:
https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/are-biblical-creationists-cornered/

//your embracing of pagan versions such as the Gilgamesh epic. //

That’s an outright lie; show me where I have "embraced” the Gilgamesh epic over scripture. I simply pointed out that there are flood stories written prior to Genesis. So what? If there are, there are. Pointing out this fact does not mean those stories are "embraced.”

Why all the slanderous aspersions? There are lots of Christians who believe in an ancient universe. Big deal- get over it. I believe all scripture is true.

Chris: What a well written and thought out post, it was beautiful. I very much appreciate your candor and graciousness.

I had read your previous post explaining the old vs young appearances...it's thought provoking.

Thank you for expressing your view it was a blessing to me.

I in fact love science and wanted to be a scientist in my younger years, I didn't have what it takes.

I hear what you are saying about the world using scientific finds in a good way...and I acknowledged that earlier, I simply refuse the philosophy behind a science that requires me to believe them over God.

Great post brother.

And?

I thought you were going to show where I was "embracing” the epic of Gilgamesh.

Hi Mary: you wrote to me...way deep into this thread and I hadn't thanked you for the kind encouragement. It was way beyond what I deserve, but I am thankful for God's grace to keep me despite myself. Thanks for your gracious post.

This is insane. The bible was written by men moved by the Spirit. Men. Real, living men who actually lived in an actual time where they were taught actual things according to the actual understanding of the time. They were wrong on a great deal of things as to the cosmology of the world and other sciences.

If anyone disagrees with that I ask you this (I have asked this before):

1. Have you ever spoken by unction of the Spirit?
2. At that time did you understand everything regarding all space, time and matter? Or was the revelation pertaining to the spiritual climate you were in?

Brethren, use common sense. You don't have to believe in what protestants typically believe. Their beliefs are new ones, not the ones taught by our fathers. Dig deeper. Go back to the catholic church from where we came. Dig Deeper. Go back to the apostles and our Christ. Stop there. Forget sola scriptura, sola fide and all the other things we must believe because...others believed that way? We were taught to believe it? Taught that to deny those things is heresy?

Brethren, forget ALL those things. Seek the Truth as laid out by the apostles, the things taught before the wolves came in (Acts 20:29). Before your views on the "doctrines" of the faith were formed. The disciples followed truth and they held to that. It is in SPIRIT not in the letter. Realize that there is an incredible amount of time between what the apostles taught and what we believe. Know that many doctrines were rejected, debated and accepted in that time. Kingdoms fell, others rose. Cultures disappeared, new languages came and languished. Any belief you have is going to affect your view and reading of scripture, isn't that a serious thing? Shouldn't you re-examine the things you were taught? The things that churches across America and the world teach as truth? Sola Scriptura. Infallible in all areas. I have not seen that in the bible. Yet if you come to scripture with that belief then you will see it everywhere and perhaps miss the meaning of a man who did not necessarily share that same belief, a man who was making a much meatier spiritual statement (is not our God spirit?.) Because you believe it, because others believed it who sound good to you, does not make it true. Brethren letting go of these shackles allows you to see the scriptures in an entirely different way and believe me, you who try to make me out as attacking the bible, you will love and cherish those Holy Words more than any other possession on this planet, from Genesis to Revelation the Alpha and Omega is wondrously revealed.

Pray for wisdom brethren.

by Todd
It’s pretty hard for me to believe that humans withstood numerous giant meteor impacts and supervolcanoes etc in the past 6000 years. Where is the biblical record of same? They say when the Yellowstone volcano last erupted 600,000 or so years ago it instantly buried bison many states distance away. And that’s just one volcano and says nothing about the extinction level meteor impacts (we can see the craters) over the earths history.

I don't know why Todd believing in an old earth challenges YOUR faith or YOUR belief in God. You still wake up saved and love Jesus, don't you?!! You still love Todd as Christ said to love your neighbor, don't you? I can't understand how someone believing different from the rest of you brings out your heretic measure.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Job 38

God bless us all and in the love of Christ I submit this!!
Lisa

Hi Tyler: your last post sure opened a bag of cats, there's about a dozen new threads that could emerge from it.

So, instead of derailing this thread with an attempt to follow any of your points I'll just leave off answering anything in that last post.

Hi Lysa: I knew there were some lurkers out there who sided with Todd but hadn't said anything.

My incessant rattling-on about YEC or OEC is not because I am challenged by unbelief toward God or his word...its the opposite, I am confident in what I believe and therefore make my claims.

However...I praise the Lord for your joy and loving fellowship with Jesus.

Lisa I do appreciate you chiming in.

I did want to clarify that for me I am able to compartmentalize a non-literal interpretation of Gen. 1 so that it does not affect my belief in literal miracles, including the resurrection, described in the rest of scripture. I do not believe that Genesis 3 is anything other than a literal account.

There has been an attempt made to equate an OE view of creation with a "slippery slope" in regard to other miraculous events in scripture and it has been suggested that to deny a literal rendering of Gen 1 is a denial of the reality of the resurrection. That is an exceedingly large conclusion to jump to and it certainly does describe my position personally. I still believe creation ex nihilo is miraculous, even if occurred more than 6000 years ago. It is no less miraculous if it occurred 6000 years ago or 13 billion years ago.

But, in my mind only (can't speak up for anybody else) I just can't reconcile a 6000 year old earth and all its implications with science. Science is not "the enemy" in my mind; I know others disagree. I know Ken Ham reconciles a 6000 year old earth it to his satisfaction quite easily, and I certainly don't begrudge him for doing so. He may in fact be right; I am not so certain of my view that I cannot 100% rule out his view.

CalvaryCom, I am not catholic, as I assume youre implying. But I dont count them the boogeyman as many do, at least not as a whole. God judges individuals. I've been too catholic mass a handful of times as an adult to see. But I know my history. What I meant by coming from the catholic church is Luthers break from it and the stsrt of protestantism. So you can trace protestanism to luther, luther from the catholic church and the catholic church back to Paul. Im sorry if you dont like that, but it is true.

Either way what you said about corruption proves my point. Examine the roots of your beliefs.

Who would have thought a day would come when a christian would be attacked for telling people to seek things that are true? Because in the end that is all I'm saying. Don't blindly accept the teachings of whatever denomination you belong to. Seek the truth apart from those things that were established by people you don't know. Hearken back to the writings of those who were approved by Christ and cling to them instead. Seek truth and you will find Christ, not dogma.

by gloryandgrace
My incessant rattling-on about YEC or OEC is not because I am challenged by unbelief toward God or his word...its the opposite, I am confident in what I believe and therefore make my claims.

by TMK
But, in my mind only (can't speak up for anybody else) I just can't reconcile a 6000 year old earth and all its implications with science. Science is not "the enemy" in my mind; I know others disagree. I know Ken Ham reconciles a 6000 year old earth it to his satisfaction quite easily, and I certainly don't begrudge him for doing so. He may in fact be right; I am not so certain of my view that I cannot 100% rule out his view.

Genesis 1 states "and the earth was void and without form..." Honestly, I was taught years ago that we have no clue what took place during this time, dinosaurs could have lived, the neanderthal could have lived. We do not know because we weren't there and the Bible doesn't specify. So I do not think this is a hell/heaven issue but obviously there are many here that disagree with that!! LOL

Brother, God bless you, don't expect any more from me in this thread, I just wanted to cast my lot towards the old earth and that I'm not bound for hell, praise God, because of it!! :) :) :)

I wonder if the length of the thread is not in some way indicative of a topic that just might have more than passing importance to the body of Christ as a whole. Is it a salvation issue? Perhaps it has an impact more than we think. Let me give you an example.

A certain eight year old boy that I knew was very intelligent. He confided in his Sunday School teacher that he was not sure he could believe in God. His reason was that the "science" of an old earth and millions of years conflicted with what the Bible was saying as he read it. He decided that the "smart" scientists must be right. He is away from God at this time (He is about 30 now).

I know, anecdotal evidence is the weakest kind of evidence, but it was true in this boy's life.

To me it all hinges on the authority of the Word of God. Does it mean what it plainly says, or does it not? That to me is how this can become an important issue to discuss. What if our interpretation of Genesis is applied to the rest of scripture?

I believe in a young earth, and I am somewhat trained in physics and mathematics, having a degree to teach both on the secondary level. So I have a lot of schooling in old earth theories and ideas. I mean by this that I think I have a strong grasp on the secular, scientific evidences of an old earth, and I see many problems with all of them. That being said, I would like to propose a few questions and ask for Biblical answers.

Does the Bible give an accurate chronology from Adam to Jesus? In other words, can we trust the historical accuracy of the Word of God?

How many years does the Bible record from Adam to Jesus?

How long, Biblically, was creation? That is, how much time elapsed from the beginning of all creation until Adam was created?

As you can see, my questions are a bit leading I freely admit. And I pose them, not to be argumentative at all, but because these are the questions that we must answer Biblically if we truly believe the historicity of the Bible and if we hope to have a Biblical answer to the question of old or young earth. So then one more question.

If the earth is truly old, what clear Biblical evidence is there for the old age. In other words, where to we fit the millions or billions of years in scripture, and what scripture or scriptures tell us where and how to do that?

In other words, I believe the clear reading is the correct reading unless there is compelling scripture to cause me to give another interpretation.

Hope that all makes sense.

Christopher:

This leads me back to the topic at hand.

There are reasons why scientists believe in an "old" universe. It is about observation. Over the last century, scientists have determined the speed of light. With that speed in mind (and through observation), they triangulated the movement of entities in the universe. These things allowed them to determine distance. Since that distance is measure in light years (the distance that light would travel in a year), then they determined that observable light had traveled from stars for millions and even billions of years.

Einstein (and others) helped determine the relativity and relationship of things like light, mass, space and time. Their observations -- seemingly verified via many, many experiments -- resulted in discoveries and even inventions before they're invented. For instance, the concept of the atomic bomb was realized long before one was ever tested. This is because scientific law seemed to indicate what would happen by "splitting the atom."

This understanding of the speed of light and how light from extremely distant celestial bodies (so many millions and billions of miles away) has already reached the Earth ultimately led physicists to perceive an incredibly ancient universe. This happened to coincide with what chemists observed regarding the rate of decay and half-life of atoms. It also coincided with what geologists observed in regard to formations that seemingly told the Earth's geological age.

The matter of starlight and time is a very interesting one. Have you read Dr. Russell Humphrey's cosmology? I think there is so much we simply do not understand. We think we have it all sewn up, and then we make a leap in understanding and it upsets the apple cart. Einstein did this when he proposed that mass bends space-time, resulting in what we experience as gravity. It turned physics on its head in that area. It is not inconceivable at all that a universe flung into space from a common point of origin (A Biblical concept supported by scripture) could, 6000 years later, look as if objects must be billions of years old based on the speed of light as we know it. It is simply that we have such limited knowledge of this area of physics.

Hi Todd: Personally I was hoping Lysa would join the discussion, I don't like it when there's only one guy with an opposing view and the majority are against his view. I don't like it because it can look like a beat-down when lone dissenter is fielding so many opposing views.

Of course I too have been the odd-man-out at other venues and when it gets heated I get wearied by the numerous responses I give. That is probably my own fault and weakness.

By the way, there is a misunderstanding between us. I am not saying to disbelieve Genesis is to disbelieve the resurrection. I am saying Rational wiki and those of their kind use science to make their case for an old earth and they use science to make their case against the resurrection. So as not to 'pick and chose' which science they are using...I lump them together. When I do that, I have to recognize a united front against creation and resurrection by the atheist/agnostic/skeptic adhering to
'science' as the reason for rejection of what I believe.

If I use their science to advance my claims on one end and deny that same science on the other end, it feels disingenuous of me to offer that science as a help with one hand and then deny that same science cannot help with the other.

Rationalwiki denies the supernatural in toto.

Neither I, nor any evangelical OE proponent I know of denies the supernatural and it is not the goal of me or any other OE evangelical to create some doubt about the supernatural in the Bible.

Like I said, I believe the creation of the universe WAS in fact a supernatural miracle of God.

Atheists reject the supernatural so they will not accept miracles because they cannot be proven by science.

I see no inconsistency in accepting an old age of the earth (accepting popular science) and accepting miracles like the resurrection (rejecting popular science) because I just believe the earth was miraculously created long long ago. I reject popular science’s conclusion that the creation ex nihilo had nothing to do with God and that it "just came to be.” In other words, I accept scientific evidence for an ancient universe but I reject the conclusion that the creation was not supernatural (ie created by God).

I see no inconsistency in accepting an old age of the earth (accepting popular science) and accepting miracles like the resurrection (...) I accept scientific evidence for an ancient universe but I reject the conclusion that the creation was not supernatural (ie created by God).

I've been on this forum a long time, and have seen this topic re-cycled a lot, always lengthy threads. I confess this time I only read the first and last page. Let me know if I missed something new to the discussion.
I wonder why it keeps coming up.

Hi Todd,

I apologize for having just noticing your post addressed to me after my initial post in this thread.

.......

You wrote, "One thing I wasn’t clear about is where you think the "observer” was positioned in Genesis 1? In other words, Genesis 1 is reported from what perspective?"

.......

This is a good question. Obviously, the writer of the Genesis account -- whether Moses or someone else -- is under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And, of course, eternity is timeless.

Now consider the moment that God created the entire universe. God said, "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:1). Elsewhere, the Bible says that the world was made by the "breath of his mouth" (Psalm 33:11). Revelation 20 mentions how the Earth and the heavens fled from God's presence.

In an odd way, the triangulation and expansion of space indicates that all matter in the universe is fleeing from a single point. This was the entire reason that the Big Bang theory began.

Scientists who measured the expansion wanted to know where the known physical universe was expanding from. It could be mapped as coming from one place. They measured the rate of the universe's expansion from that place and came up with a figure for the apparent age of the universe.

As gravity/gravitational bend is a consequence of mass (and relativity means that this creates bends in space-time), they reasoned that the enormous gravitational pull would have required an enormous explosion -- a "big bang" -- that would have been so unfathomably enormous that it allowed for expansion from what was a virtually immeasurable massive gravitational singularity. This is why I used the anecdote about black holes.

Light -- something with virtually no mass -- can not escape a black hole once it has approached beyond the point close enough known as the "event horizon." Yet, light escaped this enormous mass of the entire known universe at the moments following creation. The force had to be so great that it continues to defy that gravitational pull and expands to this day.

Now, suppose for a moment that what scientists consider the "Big Bang" was actually the moment in creation in which God said, "Let there be light" (or, perhaps, before that because the Earth and universe existed before God said "Let there be light"). The subsequent moments of creation included the expansion of the universe and how all matter in the universe became what we know it to be today.

Relativity tells us that time behaves differently because of mass. There are reasons for why scientists have concluded this and how observation and experimentation have verified it. In fact, most scientists actually consider "time" itself to be a byproduct of mass. They postulate that time is a measurement of how light must interact against mass. Without mass, there would be no time.

Time behaves differently because of this interaction with mass. The old "relativity" anecdote about how the speed of a ball's movement from a father tossing it slowly to his child on a glass train differs from the speed of a person standing on the ground and watching that train (and father, child and ball) move by. The father and child would conclude that the ball's speed was very low. However, the outside observer would see that ball moving at a much faster velocity -- because it is happening on a train moving 60 mph.

Relativity tells us that time behaves differently according to mass. Time would be slower for a person near the mass of a black hole (like the one at the center of the Milky Way) than someone further from it. This would be much, MUCH more apparent when given the mass of the universe in a much more confined space.

So, back to your question:

I would argue that the Genesis account of time -- six days of creation -- could be six days from the perspective of God while time behaved much more rapidly within the middle of expansion of the universe (and even more so for something on the outer edge of the universe). In this case, a day from the perspective of the initial position of creation could be billions of years on the elsewhere.

Of course, even a "day" is measured differently on different planets -- as planetary rotation differs. A day is defined as a time period by which it takes for a planet to rotate fully on its access. A day on Earth about 24 hours. A "day" on Mercury is the equivalent of 59 days on Earth. A "day" on Venus is the equivalent of 243 days on Earth. The term "day" is not even defined in Genesis. This is interesting because the Sun and Moon weren't created until the "fourth day."

.......

You also wrote, "Also, is there objective evidence that light slows down or speeds up near a black hole?"

.......

Yes. There have been many peer-reviewed experiments by which things like general relativity, special relativity and time dilation are seemingly confirmed. In fact, every viable experiment from the days of Einstein until now have seemingly verified this. A famous experiment was the Hafele”“Keating experiment in 1971. However, there have been many such experiments (mostly involving sets of atomic clocks) during space travel and via particle accelerators. Scientists continue to run experiments; however, their goal is mostly to measure the differences in order to accurately measure the time dilation effect itself.

Let me conclude by acknowledging that I am not trying to reason just "how" God created the universe. I believe that it is well beyond the limits of my understanding -- something that I really don't want to lean upon anyway. After all, I don't need the type of encounter in which God confronted Job when Job began rationalizing the ways of the Lord with his own "insight."

I would much rather rest at the feet of Jesus than try to figure out how he did what he did and present my own undoubtedly flawed conclusions to people who may or may not be antagonistic toward God. I am greatly fearful of the terrible thought of presenting something that isn't accurate and/or something that could potentially lead someone astray.

At the same time, I've taken many advanced courses in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. I understand why scientists believe as they do -- and I understand how something like a literal six days of creation can seem like a stumbling block for them.

Yet, I've known scientists and science professors who believed in the Lord. I've also been able to share my thoughts with unbelieving scientists and science professors without having them dismiss me as some sort of mindless and unintelligent imbecile who tries to dabble in subjects foreign to him.

I've even noticed that my conversations about science and my relationship with the Lord often end up frightening them. I suppose that it must be discombobulating to even consider that the "godless" universe might not actually be "godless."

One guy (a Physics lab instructor) who used to try to poke holes in my views about God as well as my thoughts about science and the universe eventually admitted that he could be wrong. He said, "If you're even partially right, then I am hopelessly lost." I replied, "That's where you're wrong. There is always hope in Jesus Christ." I usually challenge such individuals to try praying to God -- even if they aren't convinced that God exists.

CalvaryCom. Amen. My point in bringing up past beliefs is as follows. I was declared a heretic for saying that those who wrote the Old Testament, particularly Moses, were not infallible in their understanding of science. They were men who subscribed to the beliefs of their time. I do believe in the literal creation account in Genesis 1. I also believe in the literal creation account of John 1:1-3 (not to imply they are contradicting).

We elevate the writers of the bible to these all-knowing super beings. Why does it upset people that they were taught as facts things we now know are wrong? Isn't that just simple history? What is our faith resting in? Why MUST it be that way?

I argue only for an understanding of the books. In Genesis' case it is a VERY ancient book. That does not mean its not true, only that the person who transcribed the vision was working with what he had. Moses couldn't understand the quantum mechanics going on when God had the earth bring forth living creatures and neither could the Israelites he was writing too. Understand brethren, Moses interpreted the vision he saw through his understanding which was in accordance with sciences of the day. IT IS STILL TRUE! IT IS STILL GOOD!

Most protestant denominations say the bible must be entirely without any error. I don't understand why. I was not taught this from the scriptures but I have learned that within the bible, and the bible alone, are the very truths of the universe, the mind, the heart, the soul, the spirit.

CalvaryCom, you say: The revelation of the Holy Spirit NEVER runs counter to the revealed will of God as found in the Scriptures. That is a bedrock truth any born again believer can rest in.

We are in agreement. What then is the issue?.

To those I have spoken with in this forum, you suppose that because of my views that the scriptures were written by men, inspired by the Holy Spirit, but written through their understanding, that I am a heretic. Well what if I affirm all things good and just as you do, perhaps even more so, despite this view of the scriptures? What if I too weep and laugh and confess, honor and worship God? Am I still a heretic? And if so, by whose standard?

I tell them that He could have done it all within a split second, but that He did it this way to show us the pattern for living: six days shall ye work, & the seventh is the Sabbath.

Alec,
Yes, the seven-day cycle was to be a pattern for God’s people. But it would be a stretch to use this as proof. There were other Sabbath time cycles too ”“ 7 years and 70 years. Furthermore, in the New Covenant order of things the Sabbath rest was a picture (shadow) of salvation itself: Christ’s Sabbath rest which is a spiritual reality of the shadow. We so easily conflate that with "Sunday" - and risk living in the "shadow" again.

I think we have a hard time with this topic (and maybe undue fascination) because our minds are shaped by our western scientific, empirical frame of thinking and we are trying to read our mindset back into an ancient text, anachronistically. We could be literally quite wrong.

Another thought:
The seventh day represents more than just rest for God, but the completion of his work. Likewise God completed the work of a different "heaven and earth”, ie the Kingdom of God, though the cross. Jesus said, "It is finished”. And thus our God performed two grand completions: a natural order and a spiritual order. What a parallel!

May God help us not to gravitate to the "shadow”?

Diane

//Let me know if I missed something new to the discussion.
I wonder why it keeps coming up. //

Nope Diane you haven’t missed too much.

Your question is a good one. Deltadom started this topic and also the last one that went on for a good while.

The only conclusion I can reach is that he wants to stomp out any dissent and then when someone dares to dissent folks get all excited because they view it as an attack on the very foundations of Christianity or some such nonsense.

Personally I find the subject interesting which is why I get dragged in. I also am not a fan of dogmatism and name calling when it comes to gray areas so I get involved for that reason as well.

@ Todd - I think that I need to rephrase my response to your second question. Science doesn't teach that light "speeds up" or "slows down" near a black hole (or any significant mass).

In fact, the entire basis behind particle physics is that light's speed is the universal constant. Without some outside force influencing it, it cannot speed up or slow down. It simply goes at the same speed at all times. Even the experimentation of light speeding up (for instance, as it is directed through a cloud of cesium vapor) only finds a very short-lived and variance in speed.

My "yes" answer was actually concerning TIME rather than light. There is evidence of TIME moving at a different rate in contrast to position in space or via motion.

I hope that makes a little more sense.

Chris-

I appreciate your response- but not sure I 100% understand it. I had trouble with "a brief history of time” as well and that was meant for laymen.

But if I may try to summarize what you are saying, it seems to be that you think the universe may be billions of years old "out there” but only 1000s of years old in these here parts. Is that a fair summary?

If so, i like the idea and it does explain some things, but I am not sure if that means the earth is objectively billions, or thousands of years old. In other words, if it is 1000s of years old in these here parts but billions of years old "out there,” how old is it actually?

Hi Wayne (twayneb),

No, I haven't read anything from Dr. Russell Humphrey. I think that someone else had mentioned him some time ago in a similar discussion on SermonIndex. I looked him up a few minutes ago and found a list of his publications. So, I might go ahead and buy one of his books on the subject.

In fact, most of my discussions on this matter have been confined to university professors and researchers as well as friends at NASA (primarily at Langley Research Center and Ames Research Center). With only a few exceptions, my conversations have mostly been with non-believers.

I think that there is something of a difference in my proposal about time and the apparent conflict between a young Earth (according to the widely-understood Biblical account) and observational research that indicates a vastly older universe (and planet) as compared with those who tend to "explain" how the universe only appears old. My proposal is largely based upon time dilation -- variation in time dependent upon the relative position of two or more places.

In this case, the universe can be both six literal 24-hour days old from one perspective (central position of looking out at universal expansion of creation) and billions of years from another perspective within that expanding universe.

I agree that there is just so much that we don't know. I suspect that we will only know the certainty when we can finally see our Lord face-to-face. Of course, by then, it just won't matter anyway.

Hi Todd,

I think that I am saying something of the opposite. It would be billions of years from this vantage point on Earth and elsewhere in the expanding universe that has expanded away from the point of creation. Yet, from the point of creation (and that vantage point), a much shorter passage of time has occurred.

So, how actually old is the Earth?

It is simultaneously young and old. Six thousand years would have transpired from the vantage of creation even though billions of years transpired from the vantage of the Earth and the rest of the universal expanse. Moreover, most of the billions of years in the expanse of the universe (and its aging) would have transpired within the first days of creation itself (to the inside observer).

Does that make more sense?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME is an interesting book. Hawking went on to publish A BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME, but he delves into things like string theory as well as the search for a "grand unified theory."

I don't like to recommend any Hollywood movies to anyone; however, a somewhat recent film entitled INTERSTELLAR actually consulted physicists in describing the nature and appearance of a black hole and how time behaves differently when you're closer to the mass found within one. You can take that same concept of time dilation and apply it to the mass of the entire known universe. The changes of time from relative position would be all the more drastic.

It seems to me your view on how old the universe is is not a salvation issue.

I personally take what the Bible says at face value (a child should be able to understand God's word). Put 10 people in a room who have never read the Bible and ask them to read the first couple chapters of Genesis, then ask them how long it took God to create the universe. Guaranteed they will never say "billions of years".

I think that someone can genuinely be born of God and still believe in an old universe, I just think they haven't got light on this subject.

Having said that, if you are an OEC, I love you anyway.

As far as saying the Bible has errors and it's not the true word of God, I think you're on shaky ground. You just might need a good dose of salvation...

Drifter: I say the bible, being written before a lot of scientific discoveries, has scientific errors. My take on the word of God brother is Christ is the Word of God (as scripture teaches) revealed through the Spirit (as scripture teaches) by whom the prophets spoke (as scripture teaches). My bible is my most precious possession, but it is in itself just a book (as in literally). With the Spirit however it is much much more, with the Spirit it is Christ and it is unto Life.

Brother, please don't equate my rationality with the scientific limitations of the prophets with a disregard for the scriptures. That would be like you telling someone they don't love their own child or spouse.

As for a child understanding Gods word, I understand what you're saying. It is a lovely romantic thought, but when I was a child I thought like a child, reasoned as a child, but now I am a man and I reason as such.

Tyler, the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible, not men. He does not make scientific errors.

Nigel, God used men to write the scriptures. He used their minds, their hearts, their passions and their positions in time and place to write His word. It was not an ecstasy where their minds were turned off and they just wrote what God told them. God gave us reasoning and that reasoning, conformed to the image of Christ, is a tool for God to use if we are willing. He does not have a physics 101 class, we go by the science we know. He has bigger fish to fry.

The mustard seed is not the smallest brother. Causing the sun to stand still would not elongate the day. But does it really matter?

Amen Frank.

That to me, is the core reason this topic generates such vigorous debate. God's word is too clear and precise. The advocates of an OE has no Scripture to stand on, but has to violate it.

It is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to them.

When Gen 1&2 are not taken literally, we have no foundations for our origin, purpose or relation to one another.

The moment I interact with a brother or sister that discard clear scripture, the relationship becomes tarnished.

Read this Tyler.

https://answersingenesis.org/jesus-christ/jesus-is-god/seeds-of-dissent/

And God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
Genesis 1:11-13

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up””for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground””
Genesis 2:5-6
””””””””””””””””””

????

ADD: how would a child read that passage from Gen 2?

misread the post
Re:\t
Quote:
by gloryandgrace
My incessant rattling-on about YEC or OEC is not because I am challenged by unbelief toward God or his word...its the opposite, I am confident in what I believe and therefore make my claims.

I have never thought you had unbelief towards God or His word.

Have a great weekend!!

Howdy Folks! can anyone tell me old old Texas is... :-)

the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible, not men. He does not make scientific errors.

I have serious concerns over this thinking:

When Gen 1&2 are not taken literally, we have no foundations for our origin, purpose or relation to one another.

The moment I interact with a brother or sister that discard clear scripture, the relationship becomes tarnished.

//Howdy Folks! can anyone tell me old old Texas is... :-)//

As old as its tongue and a little older than its teeth!😎

Hi TMK
That is a good question, and I am glad that you use scripture to make a point, or challenge a perception.

I am still thinking it through.

Blessings

Hi CalvaryCom

2 Peter 3:
5 For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water,
6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.
7 But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

Please note that verse 6 clearly place the "of old heavens & earth" at the time of the flood.

Hi Roadsign

You are reading far too much into my words.

When I quote a scripture to brother TMK, and he dismisses it as merely Moses's limited understanding, I feel there is a problem. But if he suggests an alternative scripture, we can relate on common ground.

That’s funny Todd! 😁

//When I quote a scripture to brother TMK, and he dismisses it as merely Moses's limited understanding,//

Just wanted to clarify that I have never claimed Moses had limited understanding- you may be thinking of Tyler (Martyr).

Hi Lysa: you read me right the first time, not the second.

When I address 'those people' who hold to O.E.C. that group has many different ideas. Todd happens to catch the brunt of my broad-brushes but I hope he dismisses anything that really doesn't pertain to him. I've debated O.E.C. with many many people and numerous websites, this website has very few O.E.C. adherents, other venues contain rabid adherents to it (Todd is not rabid)

For what it's worth I am usually one of the few Y.E.C adherents at an apologetics website, I receive there what Todd gets here...lots of scrappy postings and a few folks that can be mean on you.

While I hold that O.E.C is in fundamental error regarding the interpretation of Genesis I do not condemn him, you or anyone else for their positions, I consider it error so I deal with it as error, therefore my wording can be harsh. But I distinguish between his view and his person, they are not the same thing.

If Jesus didn't distinguish between me as a person who has been purchased by his own blood and someone who still sins, and is still regretfully imperfect in so many ways I wouldn't have a snow-balls chance in the infernal regions.

What God graciously extends to me, I extend to others. Even if it contains warnings, reproofs, exhortations, pleas for reconsideration...Jesus also does this to me as well.

There are some who fit the bill as scripture rejecting, scientism-loving believers who just have no allegiance to God's word...and I have debated many of these...these too are in the hands of God. I am not the judge, I am however called to be faithful to the message of Christ.

Someone posted earlier that we might condemn a belief or doctrine in another person who is actually a more faithful and better Christian than we are...I fully agree with this and no doubt I have been the lesser condemning things in others who were better than myself.

If the flood waters were 15 cubits above the highest mountain, that is aprox 300 inches aprox 25 to 35 feet deep above the highest mountain. You can feel the pressure on your ears at 25 feet of water, just think how much pressure in the deepest part of the waters of the flood. That much pressure and that much water running would change the whole earth completely. The earth as we know it now is after the flood.

So what does it matter how long the unknown earth was here. It is like; "this is my beloved Son, hear ye Him". This is the earth as we know it now, hear ye it. Tilted with north and south ice caps.

How much has the Grand Canyon deepened since it was create by the run off of the flood and discovered? None. After the flood there has never been enough power of water to carve out the Grand Canyon.

In Christ: Phillip

"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Matthew 5:18

"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." Revelation 22:18,19

Sounds like God is serious about every word in the Bible.

If you think the people God used to write the Bible had an erroneous understanding of science, may they not also have had an erroneous understanding of the law and prophecy?

Nigel-

How do you think inspiration "worked?” Just curious about your view on this. How did 2 Peter 1:21 work?

Todd, to answer your question, I hear God's voice (never audibly), sometimes when I pray, sometimes when I worship, sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, sometimes when I feel overjoyed with His presence. He has told me things, specific things that come true. And I'm just an ordinary christian; He is not dictating Holy Writ to me, I'm not the apostle Paul. If what He says to me happens, if I can feel His presence, how much more the men He used to actually write His word. He would have been very specific, I think, when He wrote his instructions for salvation, for sanctification, when He tells us the history of the church, the account of creation, the future.

The problem when you start to say the Bible has errors is you trust your own reasoning, you might think the Holy Spirit is guiding you when He isn't, because the Bible isn't your measuring stick. If Jesus was wrong about the mustard seed, could He also have been wrong about other things? It's a slippery slope...

//If Jesus was wrong about the mustard seed, could He also have been wrong about other things? It's a slippery slope//

Is it possible that Jesus was wrong about the mustard seed and was just using a bit of hyperbole- in other words he knew he wasn’t being 100% accurate? I don’t think he was making a botanical point. His point was that this tiny seed grows into a huge garden plant and compared it to the KOG.

I think the Bible may have some minor copyist errors or slips of the pen (like inconsistencies between some of the numbers in Chronicles and Samuel or Kings). But certainly nothing more than trivial things like this. I certainly believe Gen 1 is inspired and inerrant.

What I meant was do you think God dictated what He wanted written or did Spirit filled men write what they were moved to write?

I believe when God moved people and dictated His word it was a bigger miracle than parting the Red Sea.

Do you believe God was "dictating” to Paul when he wrote his letters? We know Paul was dictating to a scribe.

Frank- Nigel used the word "dictated”. I was just quoting him.

If he thinks the writers of scripture were simply stenographers that’s fine but I would never agree with such a view.

Alec I really have no idea when Satan fell. As you pointed out scripture does not tell us anything about it. I don’t think Ez. 28 has anything to do with satan. But for His purposes God subjected His brand new creation that was very good to something that was very bad.

I don’t think we know how long Adam and Eve were in the garden before they were tempted.

I remember once I was discussing this and said it could have been thousands of years before the fall happened- then I was reminded that Adam died at 930. Duh.

I suspect it was fairly soon after they were placed in the garden but again we cant be 100% sure. We know he was 130 when Seth was born.

The gap theory that is what it is called that Satan fell to the earth and then God recreated on day one of creation , there is so much biblically wrong with this , as it only talks about Satan falling in the new testament and old testament passages
This still causes a problem for evolutionist as you need millions of years to fit in
The problem is if you fall in line with this , do you agree with such doctrines as the documentary hypothesis
I do believe in six day creation becuase that God said that everything was good , I think the angels fell during creation , in the book of job it talks about the angels singing around the foundation of the earth
We also have the problem of death before the fall as dinosaurs and other creatures have cancer in them and as God created this world perfect , there should not be things like thistles in the fossil record

//This still causes a problem for evolutionist as you need millions of years to fit in //

Then how do you explain the very great degree of speciation of animals, insects birds etc in the 4000 years since the flood?

Todd wrote:
"Then how do you explain the very great degree of speciation of animals, insects birds etc in the 4000 years since the flood."

"If the Flood took place about 4,500 years ago, then diversification within kinds must be much more recent than conventional scientists assume. Furthermore, it must also have been really fast! Although speciation occurs rapidly in some cases today, such as among the cichlid fish in Africa’s Lake Victoria, the high-velocity speciation necessary to yield both camels and llamas from the same stock in only a few centuries is surprising.

Rapid diversification has been a challenge for creation biologists to explain with what little has been known about genetics. We’re not just talking about the origin of all the living species of camels and llamas, but also dozens of fossil species that appeared soon after the Flood and then went extinct.

Historically, the creationist’s perspective looked foolish if a person assumed it took millions of years for random mutations to produce new species. But if species hybridize much more often than previously expected, this can create new combinations in just one generation."

From Answers In Genesis. Read the full article here:
https://answersingenesis.org/hybrid-animals/great-species-mixup/

Todd, please take the time to read this.

I have read it and almost everything on that website and of course I have read counter-arguments as well, like this one: https://biologos.org/blogs/archive/did-modern-animals-evolve-from-the-inhabitants-of-the-ark . My point Nigel is why do YECs say you need millions of years for evolution? Apparently you only need 4500 years.

In other words, the main "fear" of YEC when it comes to evidence for an ancient universe is that the billions of years paves the way for evolution. Dom mentions evolution in every post of his on this topic (almost). If you don't need billions of years for evolution why do they worry about this?

Define what you mean by "evolution".

If you mean adaptation, then of course I believe that.

If you mean one kind of animal morphing into another, like say, dinosaurs changing into birds, then no, I don't believe there is any evidence for that, no matter how much evolutionists try to classify Archaeopteryx as a transitional fossil. Same goes for Tiktaalik, Australopithecenes, etc. etc.

(Or Piltdown Man, or Nebraska Man, or so much of the shoddy "science" done in every field of research by people who just want to beat the ideological Darwin drum.)

Well I am talking about one species becoming another species so they can’t interbreed. For example, a cardinal can’t interbreed with a blue jay.

Aren’t there far more species today than could possibly have been on the ark? I just cut and pasted this table. Obviously there were not this many species on the ark so the species that came off the ark near Ararat were the forbears of all the various species today (unless the flood was not global). I am not sure where else they would have come from.

Vertebrates\t
Amphibians\t6,199
Birds\t9,956
Fish\t30,000
Mammals\t5,416
Reptiles\t8,240
Subtotal\t59,811
Invertebrates\t
Insects\t950,000

Okay... first, you wouldn't need to take fish on the ark, there's plenty of water. Same with amphibians, they'd be just fine. Insect would survive a flood just fine.

Todd, there's about 8,000 basic kinds of animals. Of course some species can't interbreed today, YECs know that.

I believe in a global flood. If God only flooded Noah's valley or whatever, just TELL NOAH TO MOVE.

There are good, plausible interpretations of the evidence we see that fit nicely with the biblical narrative (in my opinion, they explain the evidence much better than the old earth models). I think YECs in many cases do much better research than their counterparts.

I'm not judging you, but your problem might be fear of man. Todd, are you afraid of looking like an ignorant bumpkin to the world?

Natural Selection is degradation.As Evolution is addition, there has been no evidence of addition to DNA through Genetic Mutations in Dr John Sanford book the
Genetic Entropy!

The overwhelmingly deleterious nature of mutations can be seen by the incredible scarcity of clear cases of information-creating mutations. It must be understood that scientists have a very sensitive and extensive network for detecting information-creating mutations, and most geneticists are diligently keeping their eyes open for them all the time.

Sanford, John. Genetic Entropy (Kindle Locations 345-347). FMS Publications. Kindle Edition.

The thing is the actual mechanism for evolution is not, I mean by Evolution additional information is added to the Genome!

Dr Georgie Purdom
Wonder of DNA By Dr. Georgia Purdom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1_pOc1tYlc

In this she states problems with the genetic code as it was common thinking that one gene would affect one charateristic and that is not true and there is the whole epigenetics field which means that the

The storage medium is the DNA molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid), which resembles a double helix as illustrated in Figure 17. A DNA fiber is only about two millionths of a millimeter thick, so that it is barely visible with an electron microscope. The chemical letters A, G, T, and C are located on this information tape, and the amount of information is so immense in the case of human DNA that it would stretch from the North Pole to the
equator if it was typed on paper, using standard letter sizes. The DNA is structured in such a way that it can be replicated every time a cell divides in two.

Gitt, Werner. In the Beginning Was Information (Kindle Locations 1285-1289). Master Books. Kindle Edition.

---------------------------------------

I agree with Drifter on the fact that the species of Dogs has degraded, Natural Selection is the opposite of Information Addition to the DNA.

A wolf cannot turn into a god. A wolf would lose its long hair gene if it moves say to the Sahara desert but cannot turn back into a wolf after it has moved there because it has losed the Long haired Gene!

Natural Selection is a loss of Information.

There is no examples of fossils that interlink things like Whales and Cows.

Creation scientists use the word baramin to refer to created kinds (Hebrew: bara = created, min = kind). Because none of the original ancestors survive today, creationists have been trying to figure out what descendants belong to each baramin in their varied forms. Baramin is commonly believed to be at the level of family and possibly order for some plants/animals (according to the common classification scheme of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). On rare occasions, a kind may be equivalent to the genus or species levels.
https://answersingenesis.org/creation-science/baraminology/what-are-kinds-in-genesis/

Most of the Creatures in Noahs would be at the Family Level and not at the Species level which would mean that there is room for enough animals on the Ark.

I find it crazy in the belief in a local flood as noah would not need an Ark if there was a local flood what is the point
why would he need to collect all the animals if they could go elsewhere. The coal deposits prove that there was a worldwide flood!

deBunked - BONUS - All Those Creatures Couldn't Have Fit on Noah's Ark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyqqO9Npo2k

--------------------------------------------

Dominic, Job 38:7 speaks of the angels being present while the Lord created the world (in verses 1-6).

So even if there were no pre-Adamic creation on earth (prior to days one through five; man was created on the sixth) then there was prior creation in the heavenlies, for the angels were made as well. I am glad you brought the Job reference to mind.

---------

I find the idea that God created a pre Adamic creation whom satan was one and then God wiped out the Earth and then created Adam.

There is no Biblical evidence for it as

Genesis 1.1
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Did you think there was a beginning before Genesis!

I do not believe in macro evolution- never have.

I am not stupid- I said I cut and pasted the table that happened to include amphibians etc.

Regardless you cannot explain how in 4500 years we got all the species we have today. There is ZERO evidence for the rapid post flood speciation that Ken Ham proposes. They reach that conclusion because they must, not because there is any evidence to support it.

Yeah, I go around fearing man every day. It’s my hobby!

https://biologos.org/blogs/archive/the-flood-not-global-barely-local-mostly-theological-pt-1

Make sure you read all the parts.

I'm sorry Todd, I wasn't trying to offend you. I was just suggesting that, in this particular area, you might be blinded because of men's opinions. Remember, "the fear of man brings a snare" (Proverbs 29:25). I am not perfect either, I have feet of clay; I think most of us have feared man and fallen short at some point in our christian walk.

Why is there zero evidence for the Ken Ham model? Because some secular scientist "debunked" it?

//is a dual prophecy in that it describes Satan prior to his fall as being a cherub in Eden, the garden of God, with 9 of the 12 stones (in an Old Testament priest's garb) as his covering. There is also the mention of pipes & tabrets. Sounds like he was a worship leader until he was cast out for his pride & iniquity.//

You did not get this idea from the text itself. You got it from somebody who has imported those ideas into the text.

The text plainly says who it is about, never mentions satan or a devil, and is clearly using hyperbolic language to describe this literal person.

That article on the flood makes assumptions.

They seriously try to use Carbon 14 dating methods? Those are wildly inaccurate at best. You have to assume the past rate of decay is consistent with the present rate, and that you know how much there was to begin with. They know neither.

Look up the 'Lost Squadron'. "Seasonal Rings" might not be seasonal at all.

Jochbaptist, some OEC people believe the flood of 2 Peter 3:5-6 refers to a pre-Adamic flood, not the flood of Noah's day. They say that old flood wrecked the heavens, too, & coincided with Satan's fall.

They argue that God had to (re) separate earth's land from its waters in Genesis. I find it a bit of a stretch because the reader of 2 Peter would have to be "in the know" about a pre-Adamic creation for those verses to be read that way. The average reader would think of Noah's flood, and rightly so. Matthew 24 makes a clear reference to Noah's flood. If a pre-Adamic flood were far more cataclysmic to the heavens & the earth then why wouldn't the Bible clearly cite that?

Finis Dake in his annotated reference Bible posits such views (I do not own a copy, but perused it many years ago).

Here's a question for the group: where would you place the fall of Satan in regards to the six days of creation? Before or during? It is interesting that sin & death came into the world through Adam, not the serpent ("Nachash" in Hebrew, or "bright, shining one").

Exodus 20:11 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

I have perused Dakes notes as well. He was a big proponent of a pre-adamic race (this is how he explained dinosaurs) and a pre-adamic flood. But it seems to me that an earth and a heavens, left over from a pre-adamic civilization, would directly contradict Exodus 20:11, since the very water and earth are part of the creation that is clearly stated to have been made in six days. Dake's ideas are based on much speculation and, in my opinion, some poor Bible interpretation. Some of the ideas violate clearly stated scripture.

I believe that the account given in Ezekiel 28 (which Dake placed in the pre-adamic world) is speaking of Lucifer and that he was in the garden of eden as the anointed cherub. But he found in man something that he wanted for himself. I believe his fall happened at the same time as man's fall. I believe he was jealous of man, wanted the authority over the earth that man was given, and wanted the praise of man that God was receiving. I believe he hatched the plot, and then committed the sin by deceiving man, and in that way he fell, along with man. Just my opinion, but it seems to make a lot of sense scripturally.

Then how do you explain the very great degree of speciation of animals, insects birds etc in the 4000 years since the flood?

Speciation can by very rapid depending on the animal in question. We breed dogs to have certain traits, and we sometimes hear of a new breed that has been developed. This breeding process is speciation in action, and in the case of dog or cattle breeds, directed by humans. Given geographical separation and environmental factors (for example, dogs with short hair not surviving after birth in the arctic), sorting of genetic information leading to new species is pretty rapid actually.

https://biologos.org/blogs/archive/the-flood-not-global-barely-local-mostly-theological-pt-1

Make sure you read all the parts.

I read this blog. There is one main problem that I find with it. It says the opposite of what scripture clearly says. Therefore, the author is mistaken. Very intelligent and well educated without a doubt, but totally wrong on his one major premise. The Bible states the flood was global.

Did you read where he said there was no concept of "global” when the scripture was written?

As to carbon-14, the article said that carbon 14 dating confirmed the age of trees per ring counting.

Like I’ve said earlier Christians don’t mind carbon14 dating when it supports something biblical.

"Did you read where he said there was no concept of "global” when the scripture was written?"

I think God knew the earth's measurements when He wrote the scriptures.

Lord have mercy.

"Get a load of that Nigel guy; he actually believes God wrote the Bible! What a doofus!"

In May, 2018 Mark Stoeckle Senior Research Associate in the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University in New York and Dr. David Thaler Center for Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Basel in Switzerland published the results of a study in which they compared five million gene snapshots (DNA bar codes) collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the U.S. government-run GenBank database.

What Stoeckle and Thaler found upends evolution theory and appears to support creationism in several ways.

Stoeckle and Thaler reported:

For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is about the same.”
That species with large, far-flung populations””from ants, to rats, to humans””do not become more genetically diverse over time.
That nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
In analyzing the bar codes, across 100,000 species, found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.
Species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.
Elizabeth M. Economou in an article titled "New DNA Findings Raise More Questions About Theory of Evolution” reported:

"This [study’s] conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler also told AFP (Agence France-Presse), the international news agency headquartered in Paris.

"What’s astounding to me in hearing about this study is that although evolutionary science is still not totally established, it is taught as unwavering fact in grade school through college,” a mortgage professional from North Carolina told LifeZette. "I questioned evolution and defended creationism in high school and was basically mocked by teachers. Now it turns out there is so much more to learn ”” and each step seems to strengthen creationism’s case.”

In his 1859 book, "On the Origin of the Species,” widely considered the foundation for evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin himself wrote, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ [structure], existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modification, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Experts see more questions ahead for those who support evolution theories.

"There’s a great danger to the evolutionary model in this study in ways they don’t quite realize yet,” Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, a research biologist for Answers in Genesis, told OneNewsNow of evolutionary theorists.

It appears that science now gives greater credence to Genesis 1: 20-24,

20 And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning””the fifth day.

24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

The truth is being revealed.

Have you looked into the Science of why I believe in ,
Have you read people like Dr Stuart Burgess or Dr John Mackay

Please everyone read DR Nathan Jensons Book

Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species Kindle Edition
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Replacing-Darwin-New-Origin-Species-ebook/dp/B0762KTBDK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529445567&sr=8-1&keywords=Replacing+Darwin+The+New+Origin+of+Species

Rock Strata, Fossils and the Flood 🌊 with Dr. Andrew Snelling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0imsTv5Ez4

I would argue everyone is trying to argue the opposite to listen to the entire lecture by Dr John Mackay ! Like I have had to read an article by Hugh Ross

The Creation Event speaker John Mackay - Noah's Flood..The evidence in Aus & Worldwide (full length)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IWMJ9apils

I have studied Chemistry, Physics

What evidence do you give, Have you read the Evolutionists books like I have and the evidence that they give and how Evolutionist tend to laugh at Christians who believe in a old earth!

I wish people who believe in a local flood would actually read the text as to say we have a local flood why did Noah even need a Boat! How on earth did god kill all mankind and we have a problem
---------------------------------------------

2 Peter 3

3Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, 4And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. 5For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: 6Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: 7But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

8But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 9The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

The Day of the Lord

(Zephaniah 1:7-18; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11)

10But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

11Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, 12Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? 13Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

-------------------------------------
Evolution is not mentioned in verse 7 and look Evolutionist , Old Earth Creationist are mentioned in verse 3 as Scoffers .

The whole aspect of carbon dating came up, carbon dating has a problem if it above a certain age as the amount of carbon 12 to 14 is so small so it is so hard to detect minute amounts of Carbon 12

There is Carbon 14 in diamonds !

Radiometric Dating (Dr. Jason Lisle)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR7P_6OOJCw

Nuclear Physics and the Young Age of the Earth - Dr. Jim Mason
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5fdBn22BAQ

Are Ice Cores Evidence for an Old Earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYZ-RWbYUqs

I have listened to Hugh Ross and I think he is bad !

After reading a primer on String-theory and String multiverses, inflationary theories of various kinds...All of them end up being contingent, all sources for them end up being contingent. In short, its a modernized version of Aquinas and Leibniz contingency argument using a vast array of highly technical terms. The mathematics, the theoretical physics all boomerang towards the causation, which turns out to be Jesus Christ. The Cosmological argument doesn't get tossed, instead it gets a healthy shot in the arm against future scoffers.

There is no way around a contingent Universe and the necessity of a "Necessary un-contingent Being". Those who claim to have ways around it have left science for a certain and have decided upon their own metaphysical formulations. It's fine to leave the philosophical naturalism box and begin to learn something. But instead of asking "Ok, will the real Creator step forward"? Their fallen human nature devises other equally useless metaphysical adventures.

I added this because modern science unwilling to predicate their findings upon a Divine Creator speculate and theorize in a thousand different directions, and after going all over the world end up returning back to Genesis 1. Sitting there of course have been the theologians for millenniums.

From the 10,000 ft level, you can see the circular reasoning involved in philosophical naturalism and the necessity for a presuppositional approach.

If you read some recent literature regarding things like big bang cosmology they get around the idea of a beginning
The contingency argument is valid but what form of the cosmological argument do you use
Even most.proponents suggest that the science is only an added component in something like William lane Craig kaleem cosmological argument
I profoundly think he is wrong on the age of the earth and does damage and you get questions such as why did Jesus die 2 billion years after the world was formed
There is so many other problems with him as he beleives that God breathed life into neadtherals , the problem is that if you have done any research into things like Lucy and austrolapiticus you find that what they find are either humans or apes
There is quite a few theological problems in believing am old earhr

Well, if God did not create via a "big bang” what do you think it "looked like” when He created the universe? It had to look like something.

Big Bang cosmology does not fit with the scriptures as God created the star and the planets on Day 3 as creation starts with the earth ! In big bang cosmology you have a molten earth rather than an earth filled with water! Plant Life was created before the Sun.

Even big bang cosmology has changed over time, Todd which form of it do you believe ?

Genesis
Day 1-2 Earth
Day 3 Plant Life
Day 4 Sun, Moon and Stars
Day 5 Sea and Marine Life
Day 6 Land Animals and Humans

Big Bang Cosmology depending on what model
1. Laws of the Universe
2. Particles
3. Galaxies and Stars
4. Sun
5. Molten Earth
6. Oceans
7. Life

https://answersingenesis.org/big-bang/does-the-big-bang-fit-with-the-bible/

I do not know and most scientist have barely scratched are Universe. We cannot even get to the nearest star let alone.
We know that are universe is expanding quickly due to the Microwave Background Radiation but things like Inflation cannot be proven.
The problem is with the Universe. It is worthwhile reading Dr Stuart Burgess book, he made the stars also. There are quite a few different creationist models on how God created the Universe.

Todd have you read any books on Big Bang cosmology! and compared it to the scriptures as most scientists assume atheism from the get go !

I do not believe in an Ether as that was one of the scientific theories that people used to think held the Universe together! Scientific theories tend to change but Gods word does not! To me Science tends to confirm scripture!

I didn’t say I believedin a Big Bang (I wasn’t around back then), I just asked what you think it looked like when God created the universe.

In the Beginning God...

There was no light therefore you could not see anything.
There was no sun or stars, no moon. God created the universe with the earth together.
"Let there be light" yet no physical sun, no physical stars or reflection of the moon...Yet God brought forth light upon the earth's emptiness and formlessness.

Day one was the Spirit of God moving over the waters which are now taking form, what we find in contradiction to everything we read of science is water, land appears the third day. The waters were divided, those in the sky and those gathered into seas.

Now into the great seas and upon the newly formed land God fills both with animal and plant life.

We find in just these few verses a world that now exists...and God calls what he is doing the work of a Day and the sun had nothing to do with it. We find a reversal our day-count... go from morning to morning but God began with evening to morning. A continual rehearsal of Dark to light, Dark to light, Dark to light.

We find God ruling the day with is own light, then making the Sun, gave it dominion to rule the day and separate darkness from light.

What we don't read is God beginning to rotate the earth and revolved around it's Sun, nor do we read of the revolving of the moon around the earth. Those physical conditions were not important, what was important was the rehearsals...Darkness to light...empty to filled and teeming, lifenessness to full of life and light and reproducing life.

We find out the earth is older than any other created thing for it was created 'in the beginning', not billions of years later as we are told.

God saw to it, we were to use our faith, not our science to understand

So Marvin when God created the rest of the universe do you think all the heavenly bodies, pulsars, white dwarves, black holes, comets, nebulas, craters, red giants, neutron stars, moons, planets, asteroid belts, trillions of other galaxies, craters on the moon and planets etc etc were just set in the sky "as is” about 6000 years ago?

Hi Todd: Yes, I sure do, remember there was no "light" until God said there was light, it was not until then that any formation of anything took place.

If you have stars, moons, suns, asteroids, comet etc all giving off light...it's meaningless to say 'let there be light' when in fact light already was a physical reality.

We are not introduced to a sky full of stars and nebulas or black holes...we are introduced to utter darkness everywhere until God brought his own light into the universe. I say Universe loosely as the universe that we know didn't exist then.

If you believe the supernatural creation of God, you know God's light was introduced before physical/natural light; it was in the first day ...before the Sun...that he separated light from darkness...the evening and the morning were the first day.

For me, there is no reason to believe otherwise.
Science has not provided the truth for us, and that is to be expected...we do not live by the declarations of the elite scientific community, we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

I live by the creation account, in that, I am believing God created the world I know by bringing in light, by separating waters, by bringing forth dry land, by filling the world with plants and animals...and finally making man in his own image and likeness male and female he created them.

That is all well and good and I respect your consistency, but red dwarves and neutron stars and black holes and pulsars and white dwarves and nebulae are all part of the life cycle of a star, which undeniably exceeds 6000 years in duration.

Hi Todd: Undeniable in what way? Because you know for a bare-fact or are you exhibiting faith in the present theories of cosmic age?

This chimes in with what I was saying in an earlier post, but this author goes farther and calls our theorizing fruitless.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/06/12/is-theoretical-physics-wasting-our-best-living-minds-on-nonsense/#6af9f8387566

Todd: I would really encourage you to look at a cosmology developed by Dr. Russell Humphreys. I teach an introductory astronomy class at a public high school. As a result, I am well aware of the HR diagram and the movement of stars through their life cycles. However, I also know that this science is man's best effort to understand what he is seeing in the universe. Dr. Humphreys has done a lot of work on the startlight / time issue. I think you would find his word very interesting.

The Bible is clear that all of the objects in the universe were created in the six day creation week, and it is very clear to define what is meant by a day. All of the stellar bodies were created on day 4. We also have a clearly defined time-frame from Adam's creation to Abraham and some very clear Biblical as well a corroborating secular histories from Abraham to Christ. So we have a pretty clear maximum age for the universe.

This obviously puts modern astronomy and the Bible at a point of irreconcilable odds about the age of the universe since we see stars that we believe to be millions or billions of years old that we also know are very far away. So something has to be wrong here. Either the Bible is wrong, or we as people simply do not have the scientific understanding of how it all began correct. I go with the latter.

If we start by already knowing the age of the universe, which is clear in scripture, then we realize that we must look deeper than the current secular cosmologies. Humphreys has done this, and I think you would really enjoy studying what he has written.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/06/16/ask-ethan-how-do-we-know-the-age-of-the-solar-system/

So, when you read this enlightening astrophysicist you find out very clearly that he conjectures 4.5 bill years from radioactive decay that in no way has been validated with actual decay. The scientists are theorizing its decay and with that baseline project it forward into rock, meteors etc and conceptualize isotope decay.

First is the theory of how our galaxy was formed, then how our earth was formed, the sun was formed. All of this is pure theorizing based upon what they hope is the accurate litmus test (radioactive decay rates).

What is the missing factor never brought forth? Just how much radioactivity in rock samples is considered " a starter rock"? They don't know this. They just assume that whats there is what it is and its decaying at this rate so, that works out to billions of years. Well, it doesn't, when you don't know 'the starter rock radioactive level' you can only guess at decay rates.

If I ate a bologna sandwich...and it digested in 5 hours...we can create a decay rate ratio.
But if that sandwich was really less and a tiny bite, that changes everything...the ratio they just used to forecast all other 'ages of food' is useless. Or if I had 5 sandwichs... and none of our ratio-makers know this...the decay rate ratio is blown to bits.

I smell a very powerful stink of assumptions, these assumptions are what we are getting our dates from and our theorizing and our justifications for godlessness and anti-God rhetoric.

Travis-

I know about RH and his theories; I admit I have not studied him extensively but I know that there are many who take issue with his conclusions.

I am not really (at least not now) arguing about the length of time it would take starlight to reach us.

I am talking about the fact that we observe and have discovered stars in the process of formation, and stars at their very end stages (neutron stars, nebula etc). This process takes time. One day our own sun (except for the creation of a new heavens and earth) would reach one of these end stages, and it would be far more than 6000 years from now.

Is it your belief that some stars go from birth to end stage in 6000 years?

Since there are so few O.E.C. proponents posting...and Brother Todd asks so few questions Its fair to pose some questions toward Y.E.C.

vs 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Can this be considered a summary statement? It's not a timeline statement, its an overview with explanation to follow?

vs 1 cont. 2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3 Then God said, "Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

Here, we are told Day 1...water was already in existence it does not say God made the water that day, but that the Spirit of God moving over the surface of the waters.
The Deep = Waters as I read the text.

The creation of light is on the first day, so, we see in the text water/earth existed in a formless empty state.
What does that mean? Does it mean 'not fit for human/animal/plant life? or does it mean a floating chaotic grouping of elements God is using as raw material for his earth creation? The one is the absence of anthropic creation, the other chaos. I see these two as very different things...but I find no concrete explanations.

The Space/Heavens are not explained, it simply exists...but existed as an empty vacuum, no light, not solar systems planets or anything.

What I can determine is...
1. the creation of the elements is not explained at all, only that they were available on the first day.
2. Light was created, But it was not Solar or Lunar God saw that light was good, He created the designations of 'day' and 'night'.
3. Since God repeated the phrase "And there was evening and there was morning, one day." this forces me into "containing" this act of God into a 'specific' event designed to be understood as a segment of a sequence of events.
4. This containing of the first day of creation must now be considered not as a stand-alone. In other words, I don't get to push back day 1 into the big-bang-past...because its linked to day 6 the creation of man.
5. I am bent towards interpreting day 1 as I do day 6 where man is on the earth and his days and nights are not in any way implied to be different from God's declaration of days previous to Adam.
6. The events of vs 1 text can be interpreted from my way of thinking, but the time-line God nailed down. I may be foggy on the elements and day 1 creation...God made it clear I need not be foggy it's proximity to the creation of Adam.

The danger lay in conjectures, how much modern science or modern theory or philosophy of creation will I allow in to interpret Day 1?
Scripture interprets scripture, God's rule of understanding his will and word must be the grounding place upon which to begin understanding mysteries.

Anyone know how old God is?

God is infinitely old Bill.

Anyone know how old God is?

Only slightly older than this thread.

https://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles

When I read articles like this, it triggers lots of laughs. My wife doesn't understand it...why I see the humor in this. But I do.

It's on par with the current topic.

We know so little about the universe. What is "rock solid fact" now might change in 5 or 10 years.

I like to imagine this discussion taking place 150 years ago. Instead of an internet forum it would be a social club.

"Of course the cell is just a simple blob; Darwin says so! And Haeckel's embryology proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can see the stages of evolution in fetal development! Just look at your tailbone. All the best scientists say our ancestors once had a tail, you know!"

"But the Bible says-"

"Oh, come now, the Bible was written by farmers and shepherds! Surely true if you want some good morality, but they knew nothing about science! What you need, my boy, is some higher criticism, a good Huxley lecture, and some common sense!"

I was reading about how Ken Ham's site solves the age of stars problem. He either falls back on the idea that God created stars at the end stage from the beginning (i.e. he created nebulae and black holes on Day 4)- which I will never accept-- or he relies on Russell Humphreys (he proposes that the Earth is located near the center of a finite and bounded (i.e. spherical) universe. Time dilation would have allowed billions of years of time to elapse at the edge of the universe in its own reference frame, while only a few days passed on Earth).

I don't quite understand what influence that would have on the age of the earth; Chris presviously suggested that the universe could be BOTH billions of years old thousands of years old at the same time, depending on one's persective in the space time continuum.

If y'all are willing to accept that the universe and earth can be both billions and thousands of years old at the same time, I guess we can call a truce.

The problem is with this idea is that there would be no blue stars, comets and the spiral galaxy arms should be one mass ball if that is the case

Dr Jason lisle and Dr Danny Faulkner and there are some other cosmologists who have dealt with the starlight time travel problem in different ways

I do not think the universe is billions of years old

I need to edit this post so I can put in links to all the resources that you require.

I don’t require any links. We are just having a discussion. I could post a link to counter every link you post, which isn’t much fun. Besides I don’t have time to read every link. I’ve read plenty on this issue from both sides.

I am just whether you have any scientific background.

Todd: It is my belief that we think we know the life cycle of stars and that, given our level of knowledge, they appear to do so over a long period of time. But scripture is unquestionably clear about the time-frame of creation. Even if we allowed for the gap theory, which I reject, we cannot account for the stars since they were created on day four. There is no place between day four and today to place millions or billions of years into the timeframe. So we must be seeing something that we do not understand yet.

You see, astronomy is a very young science, and one in which all evidence is obtained from our knowledge of light and its sources. Everything else is conjecture. It is our best guess given the knowledge that we have. It is not that astronomers are not extremely intelligent. It is just that they are working off of an a priori assumption of an old universe and they are interpreting the evidence based upon that assumption. Then we learn from them the science that was always based upon an assumption that is rooted more in belief than in raw fact.

We really do not know exactly how stars live and die. We have our best guess theories based upon man's understanding. But if we have the life cycle right, then there is something else at play that we do not understand. That is the realm of cosmology, and Humphrey's is as good a one as I have seen.

Maybe so Travis- but it just seems like there’d be a lot more burnt out stars (or novas or neutron stars or whatever) if it only takes 6000 years. Wouldn’t our sun be about burnt out instead of still going strong? If we can’t trust the science of stellar evolution, how do we know the sun won’t blow up tomorrow?

On another point, we went to see the new Jurassic Park movie tonite (pretty good) and I have to tell you I just can’t imagine that those creatures coexisted with men. Think of all the hundreds of species of dinos there were, and that’s just dinos. There were also all sorts of very large mammals and giant insects etc. Not sure how men had a chance against them with sticks and stones.

I didn’t want to post links but this article was very good at explaining what Chris previously mentioned, namely that the universe might be billions of years old and thousands of years old at the same time.

I am willing to accept this idea because it explains everything, or mostly everything, to my satisfaction. The author is only moderately qualified with a double PhD from MIT in Nuclear Physics and Earth and Planetary Sciences.

http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48951136.html?mobile=yes

Todd: Actually, written history is replete with accounts of man coexisting with the animals that we now call dinosaurs. A list of some of these accounts can be found here.

http://historysevidenceofdinosaursandmen.weebly.com/written.html

Dinosaur tracks coexistent with human tracks have been found in rock deposits near Glenrose, TX.

Ancient Peruvian art, dating back to around 500 B.C., shows very accurate types of dinosaurs that we know about through fossils today and it shows them coexisting with man. Man is depicted fighting them, as well as riding them. You can look that one up online by using the info just given.

Petroglyphs around the world depict dinosaurs.

A t-rex skeleton was dug up in, I believe, Montana that was only partially fossilized and had the remnants of totally recognizable red blood cells. This means the creature had to die very recently.

Just a few items you can research.

Since all land animals were created on day 6, and since God brought two of every animal to Noah, then there had to be representatives of all the reptile kinds on the ark, including the extinct ones we call dinosaurs.

Blue stars are always more massive than the sun. This means they have more hydrogen available as fuel. Yet, blue stars are much brighter than the sun; some are over 200,000 times brighter!2 They are "burning” their fuel much more quickly than the sun, and therefore cannot last billions of years. Based on their observed luminosity, the most massive blue stars cannot last even one million years before running out of fuel.

None of this is a problem for the biblical timescale of about 6,000 years for the age of the universe. But if the universe were 13.7 billion years old, as secularists allege, then it really shouldn’t have blue stars. Yet blue stars abound in every known spiral galaxy. It seems that these galaxies cannot be even one million years old.

http://www.icr.org/article/blue-stars-confirm-recent-creation/

DNA and bone cells found in dinosaur bone
https://creation.com/dino-dna-bone-cells

How can dinosaurs be millions of year old if they have blood cells and DNA which has a degradation process

I know about all those- just think there are alternate explanations (like petroglyphs that look like UFOs or aliens as seen on "Ancient Aliens” or a painting in an ancient pyramid that looks exactly like a big light bulb).

I think at least one of the YEC websites say not to use the Glen Rose paluxy river footprints as an argument because of lack of clarity as to what they show.

If dinosaurs were actually living with people in 500 BC, there would be actually written account about how they were killed, tamed, or avoided and not just as cryptic cave paintings. In 500 BC people were killing each other, not dinosaurs.

Todd: Here are a small sampling of those written records.

"There is a place in Arabia, situated very near the city of Buto, to which I went, on hearing of some winged serpents; and when I arrived there, I saw bones and spines of serpents, in such quantities as it would be impossible to describe. The form of the serpent is like that of the water-snake; but he has wings without feathers, and as like as possible to the wings of a bat."
Herodotus, 500-400 BC

"Leaving the city of Yachi, and traveling ten days in a westerly direction, you reach the province of Karazan, which is also the name of the chief city....Here are seen huge serpents, ten paces in length (about 30 feet), and ten spans (about 8 feet) girt of the body. At the fore part, near the head, they have two short legs, having three claws like those of a tiger, with eyes larger than a forepenny loaf (pane da quattro denari) and very glaring.

The jaws are wide enough to swallow a man, the teeth are large and sharp, and their whole appearance is so formidable, that neither man, nor any kind of animal can approach them without terror. Others are met with of a smaller size, being eight, six, or 5 paces long; and the following method is used for taking them. In the day-time, by reason of great heat, they lurk in caverns, from whence, at night, they issue to seek their food, and whatever beast they meet with and can lay hold of, whether tiger, wolf, or any other, they devour;

After which they drag themselves towards some lake, spring of water, or river, in order to drink. By their motion in this way along the shore, and their vast weight, they make a deep impression, as if a heavy beam had been drawn along the sands. Those whose employment is to hunt them observe the track by which they are most frequently accustomed to go, and fix into the ground several pieces of wood, armed with sharp iron spikes, which they cover with sand in such a manner as not to be perceptible.

When therefore the animals make their way towards the places they usually haunt, they are wounded by these instruments, and speedily killed. The crows, as soon as they perceive them to be dead, set up to scream; and this serves as a signal to the hunters, who advance the spot, and proceed to separate the skin from the flesh, taking care immediately to secure the gall, which is most highly esteemed in medicine.

In cases of the bite of a mad dog, a penny weight of it, dissolved in wine, is administered. It is also useful in accelerating parturition, when the labor pains of women have come on. A small quantity of it being applied to carbuncles, pustules, or other eruptions on the body, they are presently dispersed; and it is efficacious in many other complaints.

The flesh also of the animal is sold at a dear rate, being thought to have a higher flavor than other kinds of meat, and by all persons it is esteemed a delicacy."
Marco Polo, ca. 1200-1300 BC

"Africa produces elephants, but it is India that produces the largest, as well as the dragon, who is perpetually at war with the elephant, and is itself of so enormous a size, as easily to envelop the elephants with its folds, and encircle them in its coils. The contest is equally fatal to both; the elephant, vanquished, falls to the earth, and by its weight crushes the dragon which is entwined around it.

The sagacity which every animal exhibits in its own behalf is wonderful, but in these it is remarkably so. The dragon has much difficulty in climbing up to so great a height, and therefore, watching the road, which bears marks of their footsteps, when going to feed, it darts down upon them from a lofty tree. The elephant knows that it is quite unable to struggle against the folds of the serpent, and so seeks for trees or rocks against which to rub itself.

The dragon is on its guard against this, and tries to prevent it, by first of all confining the legs of the elephant with the folds of its tail; while the elephant, on the other hand, tries to disengage itself with its trunk. The dragon, however, thrusts its head into its nostrils, and thus, at the same moment, stops the breath, and wounds the most tender parts. When it is met unexpectedly, the dragon raises itself up, faces its opponent, and flies more especially at the eyes; this is the reason why elephants are so often found blind, and worn to a skeleton with hunger and misery."
Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23-79 AD

"The whole of India is girt with dragons of enormous size; for not only the marshes are full of them, but the mountains as well, and there is not a single ridge without one. Now the marsh kind are sluggish in their habits and are thirty cubits long, and they have no crest standing up on their heads, but in this respect resemble the she-dragons. Their backs however are very black, with fewer scales on them than the other kinds".

He also wrote, "And the dragons along the foothills and the mountain crests make their way into the plains after their quarry, and get the better all round of those in the marshes; for indeed they reach a greater length, and move faster than the swiftest rivers, so that nothing escapes them. These actually have a crest, of moderate extent and height when they are young; but as they reach their full size, it grows with them and extends to a considerable height, at which time also they turn red and get serrated backs. This kind also have beards, and lift their necks on high, while their scales glitter like silver; and the pupils of their eyes consist of a fiery stone".

Later he wrote, "The dragons of the mountains have scales of a golden color, and in length excel those of the plain, and they have bushy beards, which also are of a golden hue; and their eye is sunk deep under the eyebrow, and emits a terrible and ruthless glance."

In another place, he wrote, "But often the Indian, in spite of his axe and his cunning, is caught by the dragon, who carries him off into his burrow, and almost shakes the mountains as he disappears. These are also said to inhabit the mountains in the neighborhood of the Red Sea, and they say that they heard them hissing terribly and that they saw them go down to the shore and swim far out into the sea. It was impossible however to ascertain the number of years that this creature lives, nor would my statements be believed. This is all I know about dragons."
Philostratus, AD 170-245

"on the sea coast from the river Ambrize, until the river Coanza towards the south,” and says of serpents, "There are also certain other creatures which, being as big as rams, have wings like dragons, with long tails, and long chaps, and divers rows of teeth, and feed upon raw flesh. Their colour is blue and green, their skin painted like scales, and they have two feet but no more. The Pagan negroes used to worship them as gods, and to this day you may see divers of them that are kept for a marvel. And because they are very rare, the chief lords there curiously preserve them, and suffer the people to worship them, which tendeth greatly to their profits by reason of the gifts and oblations which the people offer unto them.” (Pigafetta, Filippo, The Harleian Collections of Travels, vol. ii, 1745, p. 457.) 16th Century exploration of the Congo

The book, History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136 A.D.) chronicles much historical information about the ancient region of Britain. It was written by Welsh cleric, Goeffrey of Monmouth, who lived from approximately 1100-1155 A.D. If you proceed to chapter 15, you will find the following quote: "Morvidus, a most cruel tyrant, after the conquest of the king of Morini, is devoured by a monster. For he commanded them to be brought to him one after another, that he might satisfy his cruelty in seeing them killed; and when he grew tired of this, he gave orders that they should be flayed alive and burned.

In his time a certain king of the Morini arrived with a great force in Northumberland, and began to destroy the country. But Morvidus, with all the strength of the kingdom, marched out against him, and fought him. In this battle he alone did more than the greatest part of this army, and after the victory, suffered none of the enemy to escape alive.

During these and other monstrous acts of cruelty, and accident happened which put a period to his wickedness. There came from the coasts of the Irish sea, a most cruel monster, that was continually devouring the people upon the sea-coasts. As soon as he heard of it, he ventured to go and encounter it alone; when he had in vain spent all his darts upon it, the monster rushed upon him, and with open jaws swallowed him up like a small fish."

Cmon now Travis.

When I was a kid I had a cool bestiary describing all the awesome mythical creatures like manticores and Minotaurs and dragons and unicorns and mermaids etc etc.

John MacKay, Creation-Geologist, "Jehovah's Park"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-aHXsGsN_U

it is worthwhile listening to John Mackay as he digs them up for a living and if you go to awesome science

Dinosaurs is a very modern word.

Todd I would listen to Dr John Mackay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjnu4mP2KAY

Dino Hunter "Discovering Dinosaur Soft Tissue" Ep1
https://awesomesciencemedia.vhx.tv/products/dino-hunter-discovering-dinosaur-soft-tissue

This series is from an actual dinosaur dig!

https://answersingenesis.org/natural-selection/speciation/study-90-percent-of-species-have-recent-origin/

Todd do you have any scientific background!

If dinosaurs were actually living with people in 500 BC, there would be actually written account about how they were killed, tamed, or avoided and not just as cryptic cave paintings. In 500 BC people were killing each other, not dinosaurs.

Todd: Not sure what you mean by "come on Travis". Your request was for written records. I supplied those records by some of the most reliable and learned men of their day. These were men whose word could be trusted completely. Why would they not be credible to you?

AS soon as you have a living dinosaur you have a worldview problem.

bc u dt blv u nd scnc...every teen reads/writes that drivel I wrote and understands it. To look at that with 16th century eyes, they would think we are uneducated, ignorant, lazy or any other number of traits that depict the inability to write a legible coherent sentence.

Would that summation be true? Fact is, what they considered educated 400 years ago is vastly superior to what we call educated by our standards.

A rock depiction of a man riding a dinosaur in Peru may have said volumns to them, to us in our expertise, arrogance and vanity...we think they are drawing myths on stone...about 16000 of them.

But, we have our myths too. God is dead, evolution is true, the universe came from nothing, there is no purpose for life.
We polish our myths with our arrogance and education, then sell this stuff as if its superior to fairies, leprechauns' and pink unicorns.

We live in Babylon the city center of myth making lies and fables...all suited to our generation.

A man born once cannot understand God, see the kingdom or understand spiritual things from scripture. He cannot rightly interpret the signs of the times, understand current events as it relates to the larger scheme of God's working in the world, he cannot perceive demonic or wicked spirits other than curiosity or exploiting them to gain fame, power or money. The natural man though greatly educated cannot and will not put 1 + 1 together in any way that might be contradictory to his emotional perception of himself and his ego.

The twice born man can comprehend both natural and spiritual, he is able to perceive spiritual truth, natural conditions and operate in rationality and spirituality together. The wicked man never has both. The Spiritual man receives the things of the Spirit so that he can see both natural and spiritual together and rightly discern and test both, the wicked man refuses the spiritual because his deeds will be shown as evil to the world and to himself.

When confronted with the realities of the spiritual the natural man flees to his city of refuge, which in our generation has become 'the scientific consensus'. These blind men pretend to see both spiritual and natural by way of Humean rationalizations...'there are no miracles that cannot be shown to be new evidences for natural occurrences once unknown'.

A Peruvian rock with man riding a triceratops ( with a blanket between him and the dinosaur) must immediately be rationalized away...otherwise those hateful ignorant and superstitious religious zealots will make us look bad...and rather than experience that we will lie to ourselves and everyone else that such a discovery is false, faked, a myth or just plain carved by Christians seeking to fake out good natured atheists. Anything but the truth is acceptable.

I have come to realize that it has NEVER been a lack of evidence for God in creation why men don't believe, it's their darkened hearts that refuses the light lest they see what kind of men they really are.

The Peruvian stones showing men on Dinos and advanced surgery are proven forgeries.

I am not saying there aren’t written records of men describing monsters I’m just saying they’re not describing dinosaurs because no dinosaurs were around with men.

Except here:

https://youtu.be/2s13X66BFd8

Great show though!

So if the written records do not chronicle what we call dinosaurs, then what are they recording? There are only a limited number of logical possibilities. First, the learned men of old who wrote these things, and these are reputable sources, were simply writing fiction. But they claimed this as fact, and that would make them not reputable. But history finds them totally reputable, so that cannot be true. Second, they were lying. But that casts total doubt on volumes of secular history that are based upon their writings. So I don't think they were lying. Third, what they described are not "dinosaurs". If that is the case then we have another group of real, extinct creatures that are reptilian and look a lot like what we call dinosaurs that coexisted with man. But that would make them dinosaurs by definition.

The term dinosaur was coined in the 1840's. Before then, we would simply call them dragons or serpents. Dinosaurs are extinct reptiles...no more and no less. That is what these guys describe.

Exodus 20:11 says," For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."

Since what we call dinosaurs are part of the things that are in the earth, then dinosaurs must be part of the creation. There simply is no other Biblical option. The word of God does not give us that choice. This is a very explicit statement in Exodus. If it lives or lived on earth, it is included in this verse. If it exists in the heavens, then it is included in this verse.

We simply must make a choice as to whether we believe the word of God or not. But if we once take scissors to the word of God and start cutting out that which we find difficult to understand, then we call into question the entirety of scripture.

One note about bias here is necessary. There is no such thing as an unbiased person. Every scientist, every researcher, every human has a bias, a set of preconceived beliefs that shape their interpretation of everything they see. A scientist who has accepted the idea of evolution and the millions or billions of years required for it to occur, will always interpret each piece of evidence through those lenses. A person who believes that the chronology of the Bible is to be accepted will always see the evidence that way. Funny how the evidence can support both beliefs, and that both beliefs have incomplete evidence supporting them. Its not the evidence, its the belief system behind the observer that makes all the difference.

Take for instance the researcher who found soft tissue in the t-rex bone. Her worldview is long age and evolutionary. So she was indignant when creationists began trumpeting her findings as evidence that the t-rex had not been dead for very long. But she saw the same evidence and asked, "Hmmm, maybe we are wrong about fossilization. Since these bones are 68 million years old, then apparently there is some process by which soft tissue is protected for millions of years. And so evolutionary scientists now conjecture that perhaps iron in the bones somehow protects some tissue from fossilization for millions of years. Her world view dictated to her how she saw the evidence and she said, in effect, "Well the idea that this animal is relatively recent cannot be true since everyone knows that these animals died out long before humans."

Evidence neither proves, nor disproves. Evidence only corroborates. We must accept scripture as written as true and believe the earth is only as old as the Bible says it is, or we must accept that secular ideas of millions of years is are true, and that the Bible must not be literal in its history. But once we deny the historicity, we can no longer defend the doctrines.

Just my thoughts.

Well that's where the rubber hits the road. Obviously the earth is either billions of years old or about 6000 years old. That's only six zeros worth of difference.

Do you really and truly, in your heart of hearts, believe the earth is only 6000 years old? Or do you force yourself (for lack of a better word) to believe it because you believe that Gen 1 is a literal 6 day account? I am not criticizing you if that is your stance; faith in something that seems impossible is honorable to God (especially if what you believe in is actually true). Abraham believed God would resurrect Isaac if he really had to kill him.

However, God does not expect us to believe things that are not true.

There is so much overwhelming evidence that the earth/universe is very ancient that it is not unreasonable to conclude that Gen 1 is not a purely literal scientific account. Like the author in that article I linked to said, MIT and Harvard have about 100,000 books that discuss cosmology and element formation etc and Gen 1 uses a handful of verses.

Truth be told, YEC scientists are an extreme fringe minority. I am not saying the minority is never right, but in this case I don't think they are.

I agree that the Bible is accurate in its history when the intent of a passage is meant to convey actual history. That is exceedingly questionable when it comes to Gen 1, so contrary to your statement, I can very easily accept Gen 1 as a non-literal summary of creation that conveys the main point (God did it) and still believe every other doctrine in the Bible (although Christians obviously do not agree on every doctrine). Not believing in a literal 6 day creation week does no damage whatsoever to my belief in the characters of the Bible and doctrine etc. I believe David killed a giant named Goliath and that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish. I believe Jesus died for our sins and literally resurrected on the third day. I believe in a literal Adam and Eve and a literal fall in Eden.

I guess my point is I don't see why people freak out so badly over the idea that Gen 1 may be a poetic summary of creation. It does no damage to me or my faith whatsoever.

Besides, if "The Flintstones" is a true story, it sort of lets the air out of the humor of the show.

Todd: Proven by who? surely it would be the creationists who in all honesty found those stones to be carvings by fellow Creationists?

Total nonsense. The whole of those 16000 some stones and the ones of men riding dinosaurs are fake? What is fake is their blatant lies...as I said...they will believe anything so long as it doesn't point at God as creator and show the bible as true.

The T rex tissue is also called Fake...the dinosaur sightings of recent past are also fabrications as well. Lies, lies lies.

But, we know a wicked man with a science degree is the pillar of truth? There comes a time when you have got to wake up and take a look at what is going on around you.

Me, I like to look around you tube, and if there are fakes, I want to know...so fakes are discussed...and the real are also discussed. the conclusion? The dino stones are real despite the old guy trying imitate some of the stones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGSVUZq2Qc

50 plus stones have been stolen, disappeared so they cannot be brought to the public. But, who cares right, truth is not important...old earth age is to be saved at all cost.

I'll just come out and say it...even if 10% of what this guy says is true...old age is butchered the dino stones are true and weve been lie to. Yet, this guy has much more on the ball than the 'skeptic' Trey who gives his useless atheist viewpoint, not delivering all the facts only his own skepticism.

It’s pretty established that the stones are hoaxes.

What about the one that shows advanced surgery?

These guys could perform surgery on the heart by removing it from the body but had to describe it by making primitive (and inaccurate- herbivores eating people,eg) etchings on stones?

It is necessary for YECs to cling to such things, like these stones and misinterpreted cave paintings which is unfortunate.

So, the Christian guy in the youtube video I posted in rebuttal is a full on liar? Really, His arguments were very compelling and substantiated by the ungodly (whom seem to have great credibility). No Todd they are not hoaxes, watch the video you will see he deals plainly with the Hoax issue and with the facts of those stones.

Don't let the final word on biblical truth be an atheist skeptic...they are enemies to the truth and in fact are used by the enemy of our souls to pervert those facts readily available to us.

fake cops don't stop me from calling 911, nor does an arsonist fire-fighter or a corrupt lawyer stop me from seeking justice according to our laws. Whatever fake stones were done does not mitigate the authenticity of the remainder. They know which stones were faked...and they know which ones are authentic...but that's the real rub...the real stones cannot be authentic because evolution has replaced good science with pseudo-science.

I don't let the Psuedographia determine whether the biblical copies are authentic, I don't let false prophets stop me from listening to godly men.

Speculations the Incas were doing advanced surgery? And I suppose the Incan doctor was using a cell phone to get details on heart structure? Wouldn't it be a better guess to suggest human sacrifice...just like the Aztecs?

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-skull-tower-rack-evidence-aztec.html

Mexico, Central America, Peru were all pagans of the first rate, there is no lack of evidence for their cruelties and abominations done for centuries. Yet, were going to call ripping out hearts 'advanced surgery'?

Is this the same folks who say "the universe came from nothing"? Or maybe dinosaurs carved on rocks are really just myths? Look up Cognitive dissonance.

Just look into Incan past and tell me what they used hearts for? It wasn't to save lives but to take them in honor to their demon gods. Maybe this is a Peruvian P.C move to soften the Incan rep just like the Aztecs?

Todd the whole dinosaur tissue is not fake !

https://answersingenesis.org/fossils/dinosaur-tissue/

Todd can I ask the question do you have an science background? Have you done Physics or Chemistry?

How do they date these fossils and with what dating methods and how do you know they are accurate as Mount St Helens the Rock was only Eight Years Old fresh from a volcano but the scientists dated with two different methods to get billions of years between the same piece of Rock.

Did you look at the videos, I was trying to find a better one by Dr John Mackay as he leads dinosaurs digs and you can go and join one?

------------------------

Not believing in a literal 6 day creation week does no damage whatsoever to my belief in the characters of the Bible and doctrine etc. I believe David killed a giant named Goliath and that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish. I believe Jesus died for our sins and literally resurrected on the third day. I believe in a literal Adam and Eve and a literal fall in Eden.

--------------

Do you believe that there was no giants as scientists would disagree with you and that Jonah was not swallowed by the great fish as there is no scientific explanation for it.
Jonah was in the whale for 3 days , he was in the whale for 3 billion years and people do not rise from the dead because science says that does not happen.
Why should you believe in a literal fall as if God created the Universe in billions of years why did Jesus have to die for just the Homo Sapians why didnt he die for any other species such as Neanderthal or Lucy. Which Mitochondrial Adam and Eve as there are thousands and Adam and Eve did not live at the same time according to scientists.

People do not rise from the dead according to science ! Did Jesus rise from the Dead in 3 billion Years !

The fundemental doctrines of our faith are found in Genesis.
There are fundamentals of believing in God that are the foundation for Science. People like Newton and Kepler realised that if you have a universe designed by God. As there is moral laws there must also be physical laws.

Sin and the fall are important as Dinosaurs have disease and cancer in there bones. Even some of the early fossils have defects proving that are prone to sin. As sin caused Disease.

To state there is no Death before the Fall. As the fossil record is a record of Death. God created a perfect world which was destroyed by Sin. God is yet to create a future perfect world.

If you believe in Billions of Year you have a problem with Death before the Fall !
https://answersingenesis.org/death-before-sin/

Marvin one of the Ica stones show what appears to be advanced surgery with equipment etc. I realize that Aztecs etc did human sacrifice.

Dom I was a biology/chem major in college but that was a long time ago. I haven’t dated any rocks lately if that is what you are trying to get me to admit.

Good at least we can talk as I also have done chemistry and physics !

Todd, true born again christians are an extreme fringe minority, and we are right.

Question: can we read the Bible and understand the plain meaning, or do we need a "guru" to interpret it for us? If I give my boss my Bible and say "Hey Dave, read Genesis 1 and tell me how long it says it took God to create the earth", do you think he'll say "billions of years"?

Another question: why do you deny human evolution? These same people who espouse an ancient universe also believe we evolved from bacteria. If you say YEC are picking and choosing evidence, I say so are you. What are your reasons for denying Darwinian evolution?

"Using a simple statistical approach, I would conservatively estimate that in the United States alone, there are around 10,000 practicing professional scientists who openly believe in six day recent creation." - Dr. D. Russel Humphreys, nuclear physicist

Because I do not believe living cells could come together from molecules by chance even if there was a trillion years to do it. Nor do I believe billions of years is enough time for complex organ systems (like an eyeball) to come about by incremental mutation.

I wrote a paper criticizing evolution when I was a junior in High School. Got an A+.

To me at least, evolution has nothing to do with belief in an ancient earth. I know that you folks say the only reason scientists lie about the evidence to support a billions of years old earth is to make time for evolution. That is not my motivation in the least.

I will say however that 4000 years since the flood does not seem long enough to get the vast variety of plant and animal species we see today. That is a mystery to me.

But the science proves Darwinian evolution. (Sarcasm)

No need to label sarcasm- I know it when I see it.

I get to pick and choose what to believe science wise. I am maybe one of the few folks that rejects man made climate change which I definitely think is a fraud.

I don’t think (most) scientists believe evolution is a fraud but push it anyway for nefarious reasons. I think most of them honestly believe it.

The lady who found the T. rex soft tissue says she is a Christian and is offended when YECs use it to bolster their theory. She absolutely believes that that T. rex is millions of years old.

We all pick and choose what to believe in science.

All of the 'evidences' for an old universe have problems and flaws that can be picked apart. For instance, light travel time is not a constant; light has been both slowed down to a stop and sped up several hundred times in a laboratory. It is therefore reasonable to assume that light travel time can change in transit from stars to our planet. Radiometric dating also has assumptions about initial amounts of parent and daughter elements, rates of decay etc. An appeal to authority (most scientists believe in an old universe) does not lend any credibility to the belief.

I guess my point is I don't see why people freak out so badly over the idea that Gen 1 may be a poetic summary of creation. It does no damage to me or my faith whatsoever.

Todd: I would wonder what criteria is used to determine that Genesis 1 is not historical but most of the rest of the book is. Genesis 1 fits every criterion for historical writing. In fact, it fits no other type of literature. Add to that that later in Genesis we read further confirmation that Genesis 1 is historical. See Gen. 20. Now this verse is in the middle of the very historical words of God Himself. God Himself, under no uncertain terms, said that the everything we see in this universe in which we live was created in just six days. So if Gen. 1 is not literal and if the six days are not literal, then we must say that God did not mean what it seems that He very clearly said. Thus we open all of God's own words up to human reinterpretation.

You see, I don't think anyone is freaking out over the idea that Gen. 1 might be a poetic summary. I think what I am trying to say is that God Himself simply did not give us the option of accepting it as such. Gen. 1 is overly specific and exact. What is meant by a day is very clearly defined for us. It is stated over and over that evening and morning are a day. The repetition itself tells us that the writer wants us to make no mistakes about this thing.

I have no problem with your believing that the earth is billions of years old. I simply cannot, from a scriptural perspective, believe it myself. It is only logical that the secular scientists who have been taught and trained in godless evolutionary theories, would promote theories that place great ages in history. They have not choice but to do so; they are committed to it. Their interpretation of what they know is biased by their belief system. Mine is as well, and I find that relatively few scientists who have a christian worldview have been able to look at the facts through the eyes of Biblical interpretation and come up with perfectly viable, and very likely scientific theories that are just as sound, if not more so in most cases, than the ideas proposed by most secular scientists.

You see, science is fallible man's attempt to describe the world around him. Sometimes he is totally correct, as in Newtonian Physics or Pascals laws of pressure. Sometimes he is reaching for something to justify his belief, as in cosmology or evolutionary theory. But in all cases, man is fallible. God is not fallible. I choose to believe the timeframe that is written historically in the Bible, knowing full well that the world will not agree, and might even think I am silly, simply because I know that in the end I will be justified because God cannot fail and He cannot be wrong.

I will say this. Though you have no problem reconciling your faith and millions of years, I have known people whose faith has failed because of this very issue.

I will say however that 4000 years since the flood does not seem long enough to get the vast variety of plant and animal species we see today. That is a mystery to me.

Actually, speciation is a very rapid thing. Lets talk cattle breeds. If you interview a cattle rancher who is really into cattle and history, you will find many, many different breeds of cattle that have been developed over the past 200 years or so since records have been kept. Species is a hard word to define. In fact, biologists do not all have the same definition. Some claim that they must have lost the ability to breed with others of their kind to be called a different species. But this has been disproven by animals such as ligers, wholphins, zorses, and zedonks and beefalo. Zebras are a different species from Donkeys, yet they interbreed. Many biologists do not use interbreeding inability as a criterion for a new species, because different species of the same family or genera are constantly interbreeding, leading to many, many variations within their kind. In fact, variation within a kind is probably a better definition for a species. The American Bison is a cow. It can interbreed with cattle and this cross is called a Beefalo. The point is that speciation is rapid and very fluid. Six of the cattle kind leaving the ark have plenty of time in 4000 years to expand into all of the bovid species that we have on Earth today.

//Six of the cattle kind leaving the ark have plenty of time in 4000 years to expand into all of the bovid species that we have on Earth today//

But were not the 6 cattle eaten by the lions and tigers(and T Rexes)?

So many questions that do not have answers but only surmisings.

Some day we will know the whole truth and perhaps we will all be surprised in one way or another. I certainly expect to be.

Genesis 9
9 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

Before the flood the animals were vegetarian.

//Before the flood the animals were vegetarian.//

That is a rather dubious suggestion (even creation.com thinks so-- https://creation.com/animal-carnivory-began-at-fall) but my point was not pre-flood but post-flood.

What did the carnivores eat after the flood if not the other animals that were on the ark? How long could that be expected to last? Certainly not sustainable.

Did you read the verse!
If God got them through the flood he should be able to sustain them afterwards. I am honest I do not know.

To me the plausibility of animal fossils laid down through a deluge is where we get our fossil record from.

You have done biology , how long does living tissue survive in a hospital or things like red blood cell , if I die today , how long would it take my corpse to rot to bones ?

Did you ever calculate half lives in chemistry ? How did you know the sample was pure to begin with ? There are lots of assumptions that are made with calculating things like half lives .

I think it was professor Andy McIntosh he likens it to the fact of a dripping tap as that you know there is a continuous rate , what you assume is that when you are filling up the bath. The rate has always been the same rate.
You do not know whether the rate of flow has changed or the fact that there was some water in the bath.

You have to assume alot of variables when calculating half lives

But were not the 6 cattle eaten by the lions and tigers(and T Rexes)?

Actually, that is not necessary. From 1946 to 1955 there is a well publicized lion that was a total vegetarian. The owners tried to make the animal eat meat, and it would not do so. God is more than able to cause animals that might otherwise be carnivorous or even omnivorous to eat only plant matter. Noah and his family had plenty of food on the ark to sustain themselves and all of the animals through the flood, and I believe it must have been plant matter.

You see, if God originally created animals to eat plants, and killing and eating meat came about at the fall of man, then God is more than able to cause animals on the ark to desire only a plant diet.

By the way, is there any proof, scientifically, that T Rex was a meat eater? Granted, I assume it most likely did eat meat due to the fall, but is there any scientific proof apart from the fact that it has teeth? How do we know that T Rex was not a total vegetarian?

I bet he could have a real go at corn on the cob!

Joking aside, I believe they have found T. rex dung fossils with bone matter inside.

I am not saying that they always were vegetarian just after the deluge.

Dr. Andrew Snelling - What do the Rock Layers Show?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L64Hs8seswc

Radioactive and Radiocarbon Dating
https://answersingenesis.org/media/video/age-of-the-earth/radiocarbon-dating/

I am so glad that T rexs are not alive today, are you talking about the large trex or the small trex?
Todd do you believe that Dinosaurs turned into birds like Evolutionist say as I completely disagree with that as when you.

So when you are eating your North Carolina Chicken you are not eating a dinosaur.

I just read that in five years they’ll be making dinos out of chicken eggs via gene manipulation. Apparently as a chicken embryo develops it’s starts to grow a tail then a gene switches it off. Teeth also start to develop but another gene stops that and causes a beak to form. In 5 years they will have the technology to turn those genes back on. So I guess we shall see what they come up with.

I came across this simple video a while back that addressed whether there is any evidence of humans cohabiting with dinosaurs.

https://youtu.be/Ictdr2L5w1M

I just read that in five years they’ll be making dinos out of chicken eggs via gene manipulation. Apparently as a chicken embryo develops it’s starts to grow a tail then a gene switches it off. Teeth also start to develop but another gene stops that and causes a beak to form. In 5 years they will have the technology to turn those genes back on. So I guess we shall see what they come up with.

I came across this simple video a while back that addressed whether there is any evidence of humans cohabiting with dinosaurs.

https://youtu.be/Ictdr2L5w1M

---------------------------------------

Dont believe all that you read :)

Dinosaurs and birds where found in the same layer, there are extreme problems with gene manipulation at the moment!
Dino Eggs arent to good sunny side up and they are vastly different from Birds Eggs.

Please read Design and Origin of birds

Design and Origin of Birds Paperback ”“ February 1, 2006
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Origin-Birds-Philip-Snow/dp/1846250021/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1530564632&sr=8-3&keywords=day+one+origin+birds

Dont buy it new as it is expensive

I don’t believe birds evolved from dinosaurs.

I am more interested in whether men cohabited with dinosaurs.

Apparently no dino bones have ever been found in the same geological layers as human bones. Is that true?

That actually makes quite a bit of sense for us not to find this to be true. Animals, especially reptiles, would not have a good ability to escape quickly rising flood waters and would be more likely to be first drowned and quickly buried by sediments. Remember the fountains of the great deep were opened. This is going to introduce almost unimaginable amounts of sediments, rocks, dirt and sand, into the waters that covered the Earth right away. Human on the other hand are intelligent and are good at holding out until the end. They would no doubt be clinging to floating debris, trees, boards, pieces of their homes, etc., until exhaustion and exposure did them in. Hence they are more apt to float on top of the waters, avoiding rapid and deep burial, and being scavenged or rotting more than being buried. So we should not logically expect to find them buried in the same layers as the reptiles. In fact, if you examine the geologic column, you find burial in order of those least able to escape on the bottom and those most able to escape above them.

It is interesting where we do find fossilized, human remains. In the days before mechanized mining, people, somewhat frequently, unearthed human remains in coal seams. This is exactly where we would expect them to be. Coal seams are made from all of the mats of floating plant matter that sank and were buried under sediments. Human remains would be part of those floating mats since humans would have clung to that material until the bitter end. What is also interesting is that man-made artifacts were occasionally found inside coal that had been mined from underground. Secular scientists would tell us that underground coal deposits are so old that they had to be formed long before man inhabited the earth. Yet we find evidence of man in these deposits. But it fits perfectly with the flood.

I might add this. Secular scientists claim that geologic layers indicate long ages of time. In their thinking, one layer is laid down and then events on the Earth change and over the next ten thousand years or so another layer is laid down, then things change again, and so on. Based on this assumption, they have used the fossils found in these layers to serve as index species. So, if you find a fossil, they will ask you where it was found and in what layer. They then use that information to apply what they believe about the layers to assign it a date.

But they ignore completely the fact that a world wide flood would have created the same layers. Turbid waters laden with unimaginable amounts of sediments and debris, flowing violently over the entire Earth, would lay these layers down within months.

What is curious about this is the geologic folding that has occurred and is visible in mountainous regions. Many, many layers are folded in such a way that could only have occurred had all layers been soft at the time. All layers would have been soft after the flood and hardened through heat and pressure afterwards due to the weight of gravity upon them.

Your conclusion is always dependent upon your starting assumptions.

I don’t believe birds evolved from dinosaurs.

I am more interested in whether men cohabited with dinosaurs.

Apparently no dino bones have ever been found in the same geological layers as human bones. Is that true?

When talking with John Mackay he worked in the natural history museum he said that they found lots of humans with dinosaurs but the reason they do not show them because it embarrasses evolution. He had a few exhibits in the natural history museum and always joked on how his exhibit started of at a million years and ended up at 40 million years.

it was Rick Oliver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEOxs8kz1TM

Who was an atheist talks about massive warehouses where they put fossils that do not suit the bill. This is not the talk but it is a talk about how he came to know Christ through mount St helens because as a geologist Mount St Helens did not fit the bill for millions of years.

You may think this is completely crazy

I was just watching a documentary about a criminal trial that occurred in a neighboring county and one of the DNA experts said that true science takes facts and from those facts puts together a hypothesis or a theory.

He said untrue science starts with a conclusion or theory and looks for facts that support that conclusion. Their findings, perhaps even subconsciously, are tainted by this method.

It seems clear to me that in this OEC vs YEC debate both sides are guilty of this. However I would argue that OEC is perhaps more guilty of this. Of course a YEC will often fall back on the "God did it” argument which may in fact be valid but it is untestable.

For example, how carnivores survived after the flood can be explained by saying "God just made tigers and lions and frogs and bats and T rexes eat grass for a while.”

Obviously God could have done anyhthing but the issue is what He in fact did.

//When talking with John Mackay he worked in the natural history museum he said that they found lots of humans with dinosaurs but the reason they do not show them because it embarrasses evolution//

Is there proof of this? Sort of sounds like a conspiracy theory.

That's what I thought you would say, that's why I should not have brought it up .

The thing is with old earth creationism you never look into the truth , most people rarely skim over articles. In physics you have to use the scientific method but if something becomes unfalsifiable then it is a failed scientific theory.

Things like big bang and old earth theories have been demonstrated to be false but because science has become more propoganda than actual science as you cannot test things like string theory or a multiverse or you cannot test whether the earth is old it young, as what tests your actual methods.
I doubt you looked into my links into the problems with radioactive dating, that is my problem is that people tend to not read articles

If they found a bunch of fossilized wood up on the mountains of Ararat that carbon-14 dated to 4000 years ago, Ken Ham would jump on that evidence like a duck on a junebug.

If they found a bunch of fossilized wood up on the mountains of Ararat that carbon-14 dated to 4000 years ago, Ken Ham would jump on that evidence like a duck on a junebug.

-----------------
How do you know something is true or false ?
Do you view science higher than Gods word ?
When you stand before God are you going to say that the world is created in billions of year, when it only says seven days according to scripture?

There are lots of scientific papers that are retracted due to lies they falsified the evidence.

Todd have you even looked at some of the links that I have sent you!

You either have to stand in one camp or another you either stand with the evolutionist with billions of year or with God that he created the earth in thousands.

Evolutionist cannot explain how life came from non life or things like the beginning of the universe, how single celled life turned into multi-celled lifeforms.

To me the world that we live in can either be explained by the fact that this world was created through long processes and genetic mutation, chaos, time and chance.

The fact that are genes are degrading rather than improving read Dr John Sandford work "The entropy of the genome"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genetic-Entropy-Mystery-Genome-Sanford/dp/0981631606/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Does truth correspond to reality.
Thing like Polystrata Fossils, Fossils that go between layers prove that they were not formed through millions of year, the fact that we have fossils at all. Is a miracle as if something naturally died like fish it rises to the surface or on land it disintegrates it does not form a perfect fossil.

Either the bible is history or the fact we have an evolutionary creation myth just like the ones that you read in ancient history.

When Jesus returns and we are living in the millennium, people will look back at this time and you will think that believing in millions of year is crazy or in eternity.

The fact that we have structured galaxy star systems that the Milky way is part of the Laniakea Supercluster. If you believe in Big Bang cosmology you have to accept crazy things like Inflation. You have to explain the fact that the universe is an equal temperature according to Microwave Background Radiation.

What Model of the Big Bang do you follow as there are so many? I would rather believe the bible as it is competly different than Big Bang Cosmology.

With also with the big bang things like protons, electrons and neutrons were formed at the early stages of the big bang and then the laws of physics were created.

The chances of things like the basic particles of the universe being formed it is more likely winning the national lottery or the same craziness of DNA being formed from chemicals even thou it is complex information as you can store an entabyte of data on DNA which is alot it would make your hard drive look small in comparison.

How do you deal with the fact that one gene can affect two different traits or the fact that you have the Epigenome which is DNA Software.

Where particles such as Photons created through long slow processes.

You could give Evolutionist Trillions of Years and it would still not solve fundamental problems.

Did things like Quarks and Charms just simply pop into existence

The fact that there are no real missing links as there should be millions. Apes are Apes and Humans are Humans and there has been so many frauds such as Piltdown Man
and Lucy.

I mean if you really want to look at the evidence and actually read things like the New Scientist or Nature. Some of the things are absolutely crazy.

To me the aspect that God designed History and the World we live around us. As we have found things such as an inscription to do with Isaiah and Hezekiah both seals. You have things like the Tel Dan inscription which proves Davids existence and the Moabite Stone. There is a recent book by Randall Price detailing all the Archaology relating to every book of the bible.

To me Big Bang Cosmology and Evolution do not explain the world we live in? Why are we not evolving now, How come the Universe has not ended in Heat Death and why is the magnetic field of the earth still intact or the fact that the Moon in still in orbit or the fact that we have salt in our oceans, the existence of comets, blue stars. The fact that the Milky Way has arms and it should not if it is billions of year old.

Pluto or Uranus Orbit as there orbit is completely wrong if the universe was formed in a mass of a swirling gas cloud

Why do we need Noah Ark where there is an abundance of evidence that supports a young earth.

The problem is people are to busy believing the Creation Myths of our time which are Evolution and Big Bang Cosmology which will probably be bested by better theories in the future.

I have only said like 10,000 times that I do not believe in evolution so I am not sure why you keep bringing it up.

I have read practically everything on Ken Ham's site as well as creation.org. I have a very good understanding of their position, which boiled down to basics is that there is an alternative explanation for any science that supports an old age for the earth/universe.

More power to them-- I just do not think their case is convincing. I don't begrudge their ministry.

Do you believe in billions of years ? Yes or No

Of course- I have said so plainly many times.

So you either have to believe in big bang cosmology or evolution to believe in billions of years

Why do I have to believe in evolution to believe the earth is billions of years old? That is a non sequitur.

Not sure I believe in a Big Bang but I do believe the universe was created out of nothing. Probably would not have made a bang since there is no noise in a vacuum.

So the thing is the basis of big bang cosmology is naturalism.

The reason I asked that question :) was because as you cannot get billion years from a plain reading from the text of the bible as you do not see any of the reformers referring to billions of years in there commentaries.

To do with Big Bang Cosmology, there was no bang, most models talk about a balloon inflating when they describe big bang cosmology.

I was trying to work out whether your science stopped you from believing the bible. As for me when you look in depth at the actual science which most people tend to not and have actually read authors on those subjects. You tend to find the actual evidence actually supports a younger creation.

I want to know was it either

Bible + Origins Science = Billions of Years or
Origins Science =Billions of Years

Is it more Cosmology rather than Geology that stops you from not believing billions of years

God bless
Dom :)

I believe the Bible 100%-- I have said that many times as well.

As far as the reformers etc not mentioning billions of years- quite honestly I doubt that anybody was talking about billions of years back then. They didn't have that concept and there was certainly no science at that time which would point in that direction.

Remember that in the middle ages there was a concern that ships would sail over the edge of the earth.

So you don't believe that God created the world in billions of years !
DO you believe that Moses wrote the Torah and that he was accurate about a worldwide flood.
Do you believe in the Destruction of Jericho as that is used as an argument against Biblical Innerancy. As the archaeology actually proves that Joshua destroyed Jericho as there has been three major archaeological digs to Jericho and that Kathleen Kenyon only dug up about 26m in Jericho and did not take any pottery fragments and she is the only one who dated the destruction of jericho later as the two earlier digs.

according to this book

Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Five-Views-Biblical-Inerrancy-Counterpoints/dp/0310331366/ref=sr_1_1?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1530872505&sr=8-1&keywords=biblical+inerrancy

DO you believe in Biblical Innerancy?

Do you find it interesting that it is only recently that we mention billions of year it was not mentioned in ancient cultures.

As many Atheists state why did it take such a long time in history for Jesus to die on the cross for our sin.

As the idea of billions of years is only an 1800th century concept and if you talked with the apostles they would not believe in billions of years or people like Moses ?

You must not be reading very carefully- I just wrote that I believe the Bible 100%.

The fact that the apostles etc never talked about billions of years is irrelevant; there was no such thing as billions back then. The number was unheard of to count anything. It is a more recent invention.

I have never even hinted that I do not believe stories like Jericho, the parting of the Red Sea, the miracles of Jesus etc so I am not sure what you are trying to establish.

You seem to be trying to prove that a person who believes the earth is older than 6000 years ago is an atheist evolutionist. It really seems to bother you that a person might not accept such a young age for the earth and still believe the scriptures.

I must repeat that Charles Spurgeon did not believe in a young earth and also believed dinosaurs lived long before humans. Was he a bible believing Christian?

God bless I was just trying to rule out what you don't believe so that I can get a good understanding 😄, I was trying to affirm that you believe in biblical innerancy and that all the authors of the books of the bible wrote the books of the bible. I was trying to concur that you believe the rest of the bible to be history not myth.

Before the advent of Charles Lyle everyone believed in a young earth , dinosaurs is a fairly modern word and most people believed in dragons.

I do not think there is any historical examples of early Christians in believing in millions of years as some people in biologos count Augustine as an old earther

The reason orgins is so important, can I have a quote for Charles spurgeon as I have heard in misquoted for doctrines such as annihilation it is just that he has written so much material anything can be taken out of context

With big bang cosmology which model do you believe in and have you studied and do you know the discrepancies with scripture and even science ?

I am trying to work out how you fit billions of years into the scriptures , God bless in Christ
Dom 😀

I apologize if my tone seemed angry- I am not angry and am enjoying this discussion.

As to Spurgeon: "But if you will look in the first chapter of Genesis, you will see there more particularly set forth that peculiar operation of power upon the universe which was put forth by the Holy Spirit; you will then discover what was his special work. In Ge 1:2, we read, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” We do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be””certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God.” From his sermon, "The Power of the Holy Ghost.”

Now to be fair to Spurgeon, if he had Ken Ham’s website back in his day maybe he would have been a YEC. But he would also have access to Hugh Ross’s website as well, along with all the other advances in geology and astronomy etc.

As far as where I get millions/billions of years from in Gen. 1, I obviously can’t say "because it says the earth was created 4.5 billion years ago.” But neither does it say it was created 6000 years ago, Ussher notwithstanding. I get billions of years by relying on science and not insisting that Gen. 1 is a scientific treatise. It is a theological, not scientific statement.

This quote from William Dembski pretty much summarizes my position:

"First off, let me come clean about my own views on intelligent design. Am I a creationist? As a Christian, I am a theist and believe that God created the world. For hardcore atheists this is enough to classify me as a creationist. Yet for most people, creationism is not identical with the Christian doctrine of creation, or for that matter with the doctrine of creation as understood by Judaism or Islam. By creationism one typically understands what is also called "young earth creationism,” and what advocates of that position refer to alternately as "creation science” or "scientific creationism.” According to this view the opening chapters of Genesis are to be read literally as a scientifically accurate account of the world’s origin and subsequent formation. What’s more, it is the creation scientist’s task to harmonize science with Scripture.

Given this account of creationism, am I a creationist? No. I do not regard Genesis as a scientific text. I have no vested theological interest in the age of the earth or the universe. I find the arguments of geologists persuasive when they argue for an earth that is 4.5 billion years old. What’s more, I find the arguments of astrophysicists persuasive when they argue for a universe that is approximately 14 billion years old. I believe they got it right.”

Thats ok :)
I have found the whole sermon of Charles Spurgeons

The Power of the Holy Ghost

By Charles Haddon Spurgeon Jun 17, 1855 Scripture: Romans 15:13 Sermon No. 30 From: New Park Street Pulpit Volume 1

https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-power-of-the-holy-ghost#flipbook/

He was an old earther!

There are other young earth resources that ken hams, what is your obsession with Ken Ham, as the movement was originally started by John Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris.

"doctrine of creation as understood by Judaism or Islam"
This quote I find absolutely crazy as Islam in the Quran cannot decide how many days creation is in the account and among the Jewish community some believe in Evolution.

As with Islam it is well known that there are contradictions in the Creations Days

Qur'an Contradiction:Six or eight days of creation?
https://www.answering-islam.org/Quran/Contra/i010.html

My problem with your view is that the account in Genesis directly contradicts Big Bang Cosmology. You cannot believe in the Genesis account and Big Bang Cosmology. I have listened to both Hugh Ross, William Lane Craig and I have listened to debates regarding this subject.
One of the most interesting ones was when Lawrence Krauss actually put up a letter by Vilekin completely refuting his theory as there are so many Big Bang Models with out a beginning, Lawrence Krauss gets past it with the use of Virtual Particles which Craig did not even address.

I want to know exactly which geologists you find persuasive?

I have not read any of William Dembskis book but from I can tell he is the ID camp which argues for just the existence of God not the Christian God as he cowrites with Hugh Ross.

Do you advocate Hugh Ross's views such as that Adam was simply one of many animals without a soul and God decided to breath into one of the many Neanderthals to make him Adam.

He also advocated view such as a local flood and for basically the big bang model but if you done any research there are lots of different big bang models.

So when they advocate for a Trillion Years you will follow them. As the age of the universe has changed so much over the years yet the bible has stayed the same.

What I find crazy because as soon as they launch the James Webb Telescope they will probably have to change the date of the universe again.

The questions that I want answered from you, please :)
1. How do you deal with the contradiction in the bible text and Big Bang Cosmology ?
2. Have you studied Big Bang Cosmology, which model do you advocate?
2. Have you looked at Geologists who actually go out into the field as the actual data does not match up with say things like the geological column ?
4. I have not read any of William Dembski's book does he advocate the same as Hugh Ross?

The reason I am interested is because I have gone through Evolutionist and I have listened to long debates with Hugh Ross and heard his views and from a scientific point of view I do not find him convincing as I tend to find it shallow as they tend to miss out data.

God bless in Yeshua

Dom

"As far as the reformers etc not mentioning billions of years- quite honestly I doubt that anybody was talking about billions of years back then. They didn't have that concept and there was certainly no science at that time which would point in that direction.

Remember that in the middle ages there was a concern that ships would sail over the edge of the earth."

I said in an earlier post that the concept of an ancient universe (billions of years) can be found in Hindu texts as well as Greek philosophy. They definitely had a concept of long ages. (Funny how Satan pushed this concept even back then.)

As far as Europeans believing in a flat earth, that is a fictitious story made up by Washington Irving.

A friend of mine (now deceased) always said "people believe what they want to believe".

I believe God created the universe out of nothing. I don’t know what it "looked like” but I believe there was eons of time for gases to form into stars, then planets, moons etc.

Then after billions of years of cooling of the earth it became suitable for life and God created life on the earth. He did not create man right away. After dinosaurs ruled the earth for a hundred million years or so they were killed off by a comet or asteroid strike near the Yucatan peninsula and when the long nuclear winter ended, mammals took over. Ultimately God created Adam and Eve via special act of creation in His image. There were non-human primates that lived before Adam and Eve were created.

I do not believe the flood was global, meaning I do not believe that at the time of the flood that if the earth had been viewed from outer space it would have been a globe of water. I believe the flood killed all the humans except those on the ark, but all the humans lived in Mesopotamia so there was no need to flood Australia or North America. When the flood waters subsided repopulation began but there were already thousands of species of animals not killed by the flood.

"The myth of the flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages in Europe was that the Earth is flat, instead of spherical.

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among the educated was almost nonexistent..."

From Wikipedia.org
Full article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

"Although the misconception was frequently refuted in historical scholarship since at least 1920, it persisted in popular culture and in some school textbooks into the 21st century."

Why are we talking about flat earth now? There is another thread for that.

I don’t think anyone on this thread is pushing a flat earth thank goodness.

Todd said:
"Remember that in the middle ages there was a concern that ships would sail over the edge of the earth."

If you weren't talking about a flat earth, what were you referring to?

My point was that there was a lack of scientific sophistication- if not in the Middle Ages then certainly in older cultures.

My point was that there was a lack of scientific sophistication- if not in the Middle Ages then certainly in older cultures.

My point was that there was a lack of scientific sophistication- if not in the Middle Ages then certainly in older cultures.

If you think older cultures were closer of knowing the truth to we are now. The Romans invented things like underwater concrete and there are other things still in ancient cultures. If evolution and big bang cosmology were true. What is the confirmation among ancient cultures

There is also a common misconception that ancient cultures believed in a flat earth.

Some scientists are so abysmally ignorant in this "enlightened" age that they still believe in things like an eternal universe and spontaneous generation.

One of my coworkers (he's 19) said he'd been taught in school that Europeans believed in a flat earth. I told him that was not in fact the case, but I wonder if he still believes it (because people put blind faith in authority).

//If you think older cultures were closer of knowing the truth to we are now.//

Yes- the ancient aliens enlightened them.

As to Spurgeon: "But if you will look in the first chapter of Genesis, you will see there more particularly set forth that peculiar operation of power upon the universe which was put forth by the Holy Spirit; you will then discover what was his special work. In Ge 1:2, we read, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” We do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be””certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God.” From his sermon, "The Power of the Holy Ghost.”

Not trying to attack Spurgeon. He was a great man of the faith. But in this particular quote, he had failed to read scripture. Clear scripture contradicts what Spurgeon writes. Exodus 20:11 says plainly that in six days the heavens (the universe) and the Earth (this planet) and all that is in it were created. So the planet could not have existed for millions of years before man was created. The planet itself and man were created within the same six days.

But if Genesis 1 was not intended to be a literal history then the Exodus reference would not be either.

I do not believe the flood was global, meaning I do not believe that at the time of the flood that if the earth had been viewed from outer space it would have been a globe of water. I believe the flood killed all the humans except those on the ark, but all the humans lived in Mesopotamia so there was no need to flood Australia or North America. When the flood waters subsided repopulation began but there were already thousands of species of animals not killed by the flood.

Todd: Meaning no personal disrespect, but this position contradicts explicitly stated scripture. Genesis 7:19 says, "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered." This scripture leaves no room for a local flood. Scripture plainly says that any portion of the Earth that is under the entirety of heaven was covered.

2 Peter 3 tells us that the entire cosmos (the word used for world) was overflowed by water and perished.

In Genesis, God said that he was going to destroy every living creature in whose nostrils is the breath of life. Genesis 7: " 21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark."

You see, the language of Genesis leaves us absolutely no room to say the flood was local. We must either rewrite scripture in these passages, or we must accept them as truth. There really is no other option.

But if Genesis 1 was not intended to be a literal history then the Exodus reference would not be either.

But don't you see what you are saying here. The entire perspective rests upon the assumption that Genesis 1 and any other scripture that references Genesis 1 are not historical. But without an a priori commitment to something other than what scripture plainly says in these passages you would never make such a statement. You would have not reason to do so at all. You are saying that Gen. 1 cannot be history because what you have been taught about science must be truth. Therefore, the Bible must, at least in this case, be allegory.

If Gen. 1 is not historical, and if any other verses that speak of Gen. 1 are not historical, then we have absolutely no reason to believe that any of the rest of Genesis is historical. In fact, we must then call into question the rest of scripture as well. At what point did the Holy Spirit tell us to take the first chapter of a historical book and selected passages from the rest of scripture and allegorize them?

You could be right.

I just heard something that was startling to me today- not sure if it fits exactly in this discussion but it might. It is this:

The span of time from the completion of the Great Pyramid to Cleopatra is greater than the span of time from Cleopatra to the invention of the iPhone.

It boggles the mind.

https://creation.com/no-more-love-for-lucy

Just as I said and will continue to say...Scientists do not have the truth about creation otherwise this kind of thing would not be happening.

I don’t believe anyone here has argued that man evolved from Lucy or any other ape.

That being said, you have to fit them into the scheme somewhere.

In skipping through this thread I see where the discussion seems to center on the reliability of the "facts" as declared by scientists who allegedly have done experiments that proved such and such vs what the WORD says.

As a 71 YO I have heard the experts tell us how dangerous this and that is and were warning people to abstain from it and do otherwise. What happened then was that later other experts came along and declared the earlier findings flawed and wrong. This has happened so many times that in my mind they have lost credibility and I do as I please as long it is not sinful (might be illegal in time to come, I will admit). I would a whole lot rather believe the WORD for what it says knowing God can make people walk on water - any scientific explanation for that? - multiply five loaves and two fishes to feed thousands, resurrect dead people....

Sandra

The Word in Genesis says nothing about science. It says WHAT happened but not HOW it happened. It does not even say when it happened other than "in the beginning.” I am not disputing that.

My only contention is that there is a big old "how” that Genesis 1 never intended to address.

All "transitional" fossils can be classified as fully human or fully ape (or chimpanzee or whatever). Jesus' ancestry was not chimpanzees, I find that idea offensive.

Nigel not sure who you are addressing in your post but you seem to be arguing against no one as no one has said any such thing.

"I don’t believe anyone here has argued that man evolved from Lucy or any other ape.

That being said, you have to fit them into the scheme somewhere."

I assumed you were talking about the so called transitional fossils. I'll take you at your word when you say you don't believe in darwinian evolution. Would I be right then to say you believe all kinds of animals were created "as is" without transitions? ( i.e. life did not start out as single cell organisms and progress from there) And all this happened millions of years ago?

There has obviously been transition through the process of natural selection. Even the major YECs believe that because we would not have all the varieties of animals we have today from those relative few kinds on the ark unless there was natural selection taking place.

I certainly do not believe even a single cell formed spontaneously from organic molecules. If (when?) life is found on some other planet/moon the conclusion must be that God created it there, not that it spontaneously arose.

I do believe God originally created many kinds of animals "as is.” However,, every species of animal alive today were not part of the original creation because of natural selection over the millennia.

"I don’t believe anyone here has argued that man evolved from Lucy or any other ape.

That being said, you have to fit them into the scheme somewhere. "

How many chromosomes do apes and humans have?
How many hands do apes have ?
Why do apes have black eyes compared to humans who have white eyes ?

Have you looked into it? They had to fix Lucy with an Angle Grinder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeO0JlZsXio

The Uniqueness of Man - Professor Stuart Burgess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MvJbwA9SZQ

06 17 12 Sunday PM Carl Kerby Human Evolution MP4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lbJSsnAixw

why are you posting links refuting human evolution when no one here is arguing for human evolution?

Todd, could you please explain what you mean by

"you have to fit them into the scheme somewhere."

There were non-human primates that are now extinct and that presumably were not on the ark.

So by "non-human primates" I assume you mean monkeys or apes of some kind? Not transitional species?

Yes, like gigantopithicus.

Of course there are all sorts of other prehistoric mammals that must fit somewhere as well, like glyptodon and megatherium.

Okay then; I fit them in the ark. We don't see sabretooth tigers or woolly mammoths anymore, but we know they had representatives on the ark, i. e. the cat kind and the elephant kind. So also there must have been 2 of every kind of dinosaur (there are about 50 basic kinds of dinosaurs). Glyptodons are armadillos, we see those today. Megatherium are sloths, we see those today.

Plus, there is no such thing as "pre-history", it's just a made up word. We know history "In the beginning".

Todd says,

"When the flood waters subsided repopulation began but there were already thousands of species of animals not killed by the flood."

God says,

And behold, I will bring floodwaters upon the earth, to destroy every creature under the heavens that has the breath of life. Everything on the earth will perish. Genesis 6:17

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11

Todd,

I must not have a high enough IQ to understand how the 1 Corinthians 13 verse you quoted relates to my last post.

I am not a scientist or a linguist.

Please explain if you would.

Thanks

Savannah: If you didn't already know, secular science touts themselves as intellectually superior to Christians. They figure anyone who believes that old book of myths cannot be very smart.

Now combine this with a Christian someone who has been fed by secularist science and you will see that elitist attitude emerge from time to time. "In the beginning God made them male and female" So said Jesus. But we live in an age that thinks it's ways smarter than some idiot Christian with a bible that thinks "all there is are male and female". That simplistic, childish, unscientific, uneducated opinion emerges from the mental imbeciles of our day.

It's fashionable to use the word of God against the Christian when he demonstrates faith in God where science is contradicting a God of truth.

The use of secular ad-homs by Christians is nothing new.

If y’all want to believe there were 50 kinds (100 total individuals) of dinosaurs on the ark that’s certainly your prerogative.

"All” does not always mean an exhaustive "all” in scripture. Joel 2:28, Ez 20:48, Is 66:24; Ps 65:2.

Earth does not always mean (and often does not) the entire globe in scripture.

What does "mountain” mean? What does "high” mean?

What "world” was flooded? See Gen 9:19. To what whole earth were they scattered? See Gen 10. This whole earth mentioned does not add up to the entire globe.

An argument can be made for a local flood from scripture itself; you don’t need geology, etc.

Hi Todd: There is really nothing preventing anyone from believing there were 50 kinds of dinosaurs on the ark, Noah had 7 of the clean animals of all kinds...the only thing that would create unbelief that specific kind of animal could not possibly be on the ark is the theory of evolution/carbon dating.

86 evolution and you are clear to have whatever animal God wanted on that ark.

you can put mammoths, sabre tooths or a dimetrodon on the ark and lack no confidence they were saved for propagation in the new world.

Like I said Marvin you are certainly entitled to believe that if you wish.

But a more localized flood event where every animal and bird on the globe were not killed cannot be ruled out from the biblical texts for the reasons which I exceedingly briefly set forth below.

Why couldn’t Noah have simply walked to higher ground if the flood was local? Because God wanted indigenous animals preserved and needed a boat to do so.

ADD: plus God wanted to give Noah a chance to preach. All the folks were in Mesopotamia.

God did not want indigenous animals preserved.

Genesis 6:7 And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord

I don’t understand your point Joch. If God did not want animals preserved why did they go onto the ark?

A few points to consider if you support the theory of local flood

Okay, so,we can dismiss the word " earth” to mean the globe and replace it with the word " land” to mean a local plot of earth
But what about the word " heaven” in the verse " 17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

Destroy what? Every flesh that has breath
Where? Under heaven
What is the scope of that phrase " under heaven” ?
Does that sound local

19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high mountains, that were UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVEN, were covered.

If the flood was local, why did God command Noah to take a male and a female of every unclean bird?
We know of bird migration, couldn’t the birds that were not affected by the flood migrate from one place to another? And if space was so needed on the ark, why was it necessary that they preserve the birds

19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
We see in the generations of Noah’s three sons what we now call the European, Asian, African continents

And Finally the question that has been asked a thousand times
If God gave the rainbow as a covenant to not again destroy the earth with flood water, and if what He meant by that was a local flood. Why are we still seeing local floods?

Did you research what "under heaven” meant back then? I strongly suspect it is a figure of speech and cannot be required to mean every centimeter of the globe.

He actually said to take 7 pairs of every bird. Of course he also said to take two pairs.

Nothing you have posted 100% rules out a local flood.

You can certainly believe the globe was a ball of water if you want to. Where did all that water go?

"Under the whole heaven"? v.19. What did that mean back then?. I guess I will have to say it means the same as today.

The reason I focussed on the "unclean" birds is because these couldn't be used for a burnt offering?
So, why did they need to be preserved if they could've easily migrated back ones the locally flooded area dried up.

What is your answer to the point about the rainbow?

God was promising not to send another flood like the one he sent, namely that destroyed every human other than Noah and his family.

All humans were in Mesopotamia. If the the flood covered Mesopotamia it killed every human.

Gods promise has held true; he has not killed every living person with a flood. Of course to do so today WOULD require a global flood.

ADD: "This day I will begin to put the dread and fear of you upon the nations under the **whole heaven**, who shall hear the report of you, and shall tremble and be in anguish because of you.’
Deuteronomy 2:25

"Many consider the height of Mount Everest at 8,848 metres (29,029 ft””Figure 4) a fatal flaw for the Genesis Flood. How could the floodwater have topped the mountains, they ask? Even if the ocean floor was raised to sea level, the present water on the earth would be only 2,700 metres (8,800 ft) deep, one-third the depth needed to cover Mount Everest. Differential vertical tectonics as the floodwater was draining provides the answer,10 because the mountains were pushed up as a result of the Flood, by way of upward vertical tectonics."

From Answers In Genesis
Read the full article here:
https://creation.com/how-did-the-waters-of-noahs-flood-drain

Thank you sooo much,Caleb
Let us not be ashamed of our great God and His eternal unchanging Word.

Todd I just wrote a long post and deleted it by mistake.
So, let me comment on the last part of your post for now.

You are comparing the phrase " the whole heaven" in deut. 2:25 with " the whole heaven" in Gen.7:19 but is there a possibility that literally all nations under the whole heaven were exclusively in that area of the earth.

You just said that all humans were in Mesopotamia, and the Bible said that the whole earth spread out from the sons of Noah.
So, it makes sense that no nations would have been yet formed at that time except around what we call today the Middle East. That is where the great civilizations began.

We know that Egypt was a nation while a place Europe was still living tribally.

The conclusion is: when God says " all nations under the whole heaven" He really means " all nations under the whole heaven" and when He says " all mountains under the whole heaven" He really means " all mountains under the whole heaven".

This is the language God uses to describe the flood:

6:17 ...to destroy from under heaven ALL FLESH IN WHICH IS THE BREATH OF LIFE;....

7:22...ALL IN WHOSE NOSTRILS WAS THE BREATH OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE, all that was on the dry land, died.

And this is the language He uses to describe the covenant:

"and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and EVERY LIVING CREATURE.... of all flesh;....

and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and EVERY LIVING CREATURE OF ALL FLESH that is on the earth.”

As you can see the language is identical, and universal in both cases.

The flood was universal in judgment (it killed everyone but Noah and his family) while limited in scope. I have already shown that the word used for earth does not have to mean the entire globe and very often doesn’t.

Also in its context in the covenant verses "earth” is likely referring to "people” which is also often the case in scripture. The planet earth was not destroyed by the flood.

Quote" I have already shown that the word used for earth does not have to mean the entire globe and very often doesn’t."Quote

NO, you are wrong.
The word used for earth in relation to the flood is " erets" same as at creation.
Ge 1:1 ¶ In the beginning created the heaven and

Ge 1:2 And the earth and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

Ge 7:21 ¶ And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, and every man: began to multiply on the face of the earth,

Quote" . I believe the flood killed all the humans except those on the ark, but all the humans lived in Mesopotamia so there was no need to flood Australia or North America. When the flood waters subsided repopulation began but there were already thousands of species of animals not killed by the flood."Quote

Wrong again

6:17 ...to destroy from under heaven ALL FLESH IN WHICH IS THE BREATH OF LIFE;....

7:22...ALL IN WHOSE NOSTRILS WAS THE BREATH OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE, all that was on the dry land, died.

If you could deny this clear language the scripture puts forth you could deny anything

you do not need discussion, Todd. you need prayer.
I will pray that you would have an encounter with God that leaves you trembling at His Word.

Blessings, friend. I am done here.

I am afteaid you are terribly wrong about "erets.”

It is very often used to mean land or people etc. it rarely means "planet” or the entire globe.

Shall not the Judge of all [kol] the earth [erets] deal justly?" (Genesis 18:25) (God judges the people of the earth, not the earth itself)
Now behold, today I am going the way of all [kol] the earth [erets], and you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one word of all the good words which the LORD your God spoke concerning you has failed; all have been fulfilled for you, not one of them has failed. (Joshua 23:14) (Joshua was going the way of all people in the earth, whose ultimate destiny is death.)
And all [kol] the people of the land [erets] entered the forest, and there was honey on the ground. (1 Samuel 14:25) (The words "the people of" are added to the English, since they are not found in the Hebrew. The actual translation would be "all the land entered the forest," obviously referring to the people and not to the land itself moving into the forest.)
While all [kol] the country [erets] was weeping with a loud voice, all the people passed over. (2 Samuel 15:23) (Obviously, the earth cannot weep with a loud voice.)
"I am going the way of all [kol] the earth [erets]. Be strong, therefore, and show yourself a man. (1 Kings 2:2) (David was going the way of all people in the earth, whose ultimate destiny is death.)
He is the LORD our God; His judgments are in all [kol] the earth [erets]. (1 Chronicles 16:14) (Judgments are done against people, not the planet)
Sing to the LORD, all [kol] the earth [erets]; Proclaim good tidings of His salvation from day to day. (1 Chronicles 16:23) (The people sing, not the planet)
Tremble before Him, all [kol] the earth [erets]; Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved. (1 Chronicles 16:30) (This does not refer to earthquakes!)
Let all [kol] the earth [erets] fear the LORD; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. (Psalm 33:8) (People, not planets, fear the Lord)
For the choir director. A Song. A Psalm.) Shout joyfully to God, all the earth; (Psalm 66:1) (People shout, not the earth)
"All the earth will worship Thee, And will sing praises to Thee; They will sing praises to Thy name." Selah. (Psalm 66:4) (People worship, not the earth)
Sing to the LORD a new song; Sing to the LORD, all [kol] the earth [erets]. (Psalm 96:1) (People sing, not the earth)
Worship the LORD in holy attire; Tremble before Him, all [kol] the earth [erets]. (Psalm 96:9) (People worship, not the earth)
Shout joyfully to the LORD, all [kol] the earth [erets]; Break forth and sing for joy and sing praises. (Psalm 98:4) (People shout, not the earth)
(A Psalm for Thanksgiving.) Shout joyfully to the LORD, all [kol] the earth [erets]. (Psalm 100:1) (People shout, not the earth)
He is the LORD our God; His judgments are in all [kol] the earth [erets]. (Psalm 105:7) (Judgments are done against people, not the planet)
"The whole [kol] earth [erets] is at rest and is quiet; They break forth into shouts of joy. (Isaiah 14:7) (People shout, not the earth)

Do you often get hysterical when having a discussion with someone who calmly disagrees with you?

It is not as if I am the only Christian person (including the majority of Christian geologists) who believe the flood was local, for very good reason.

Why have an Ark?
Why did Noah even bother with saving all the animals?

They could have just simply gone somewhere else.

One thing is that you assume is that the continents are the same as they have always been.

Genesis 7
17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.

19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

In this passage in scripture it says that the flood stretched 7 metres or 15 cubits above the highest mountain that would pretty much put it above the whole earth.

Yes, I do become enraged when someone denies the obvious. You are hanging on the word "earth" which could mean either/or but has so often meant "eret" or the entire globe as at creation in the verses I quoted in my previous post when it refers to the whole earth. While the word " adamah" derived from "Adam" or dirt which refers often to the population of the earth.

Obviously you are showing ignorance of Hebriac thought because in most of the verses you quoted when praise, joy, rejoicing , worshipping, trembling, fearing is referenced, the writer is thinking not only of people but of the rocks, mountains and hills, trees and forest, and animals, rivers and seas involved in the act of worship, and praise,etc. He is thinking of "erets" or globe and thus the use of erets.

Psalm 96
11 Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof.

12 Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice

Psalm 98
7 Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

8 Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together

9 Before the Lord; for he cometh to judge the earth: with righteousness shall he judge the

Psalm 65
You make the outgoings of the morning and evening [b]rejoice.

12They drop on the pastures of the wilderness,
And the little hills rejoice on every side.
13 The pastures are clothed with flocks;
The valleys also are covered with grain;
They shout for joy, they also sing.

I know that doesn't make sense to the western mind but it does to someone who sees God as creator and judge of all creation, and that not only man, but all creation groans under the yoke of sin awaiting the day of redemption.

So, while you are hanging on the word " earth" and what does it really mean, you have not commented on this text

7:22...ALL IN WHOSE NOSTRILS WAS THE BREATH OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE, all that was on the dry land, died.

Are you going to take God's word for what it says or not,and if not, why don't you just come right out and say it

Every person died- I have said it numerous times.

Dom-

I have already answered why Noah didn’t just "move” if the flood was local several posts back.

You just said that all humans were in Mesopotamia, and the Bible said that the whole earth spread out from the sons of Noah.
So, it makes sense that no nations would have been yet formed at that time except around what we call today the Middle East. That is where the great civilizations began.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

To say that all pre-flood people lived in Mesopotamia would be to misunderstand both scripture and what happened in the flood. When God created the Earth, scripture says that He gathered the waters into one place and the dry Earth appeared. During the flood, when the fountains of the great deep were opened, the land mass was divided and moved, pushing up great mountain ranges. This movement has never completely stopped. We still see these great techtonic plates moving today, albeit at extremely slow rates. We see the evidence of the catastrophic movement in folded rock layers in the mountains. These layers were still soft sediments laid down by the flood when the land was pushed up.

The point is that nothing was left that was recognizable. Man was most likely spread over the extent of whatever the single land mass looked like before the flood. (To be honest, the secular concept of pangea is probably very close to what it did look like.) After the flood, the ark rested in the region we would recognize as Turkey today and the Mesopotamian region became the place where settlement spread to first after the flood.

Dominic: You make a good point, and one that I was thinking about before I read your post. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the flood was local only. What is the logical conclusion of such an idea.

First, we must reinterpret scripture from its obvious reading to one that is tenuous at best. This is perhaps the greatest problem with the assumption. It causes us to do something to scripture that would be disasterous if we were to do it to other passages.

Second, it makes surrounding scriptures rediculous at best. For example, lets look at the Gen. 7 account. The rain that caused the flood lasted forty days and nights. The waters covered all of the high hills to a depth of 23 feet above their summits. The waters prevailed upon the Earth for 150 days during which the ark did not find any place to come to ground.

This creates a huge problem. What kept the water from leaving the Mesopotamian region for a flood that lasted almost half a year? The Tigris and Euphrates drain to the ocean. To declare a local flood, we must say that somehow God caused the water to stay in place without spreading out or draining away.

Next, if every human was destroyed, but not every animal, we have some other serious issues. First, we must know for a fact that in 2000 years since creation, not a single human being moved away from the Mesopotamian region lying between the Tigris and Euphrates.

The Bible says that God destroyed every animal and bird that was not on the ark, just as it says God did to every human. So we must assume that the Bible means what it says about humans, but must mean something else about animals.

Then there is the bird problem. The Bible says that the flood destroyed every single living bird. So every single bird that lived between the Tigris and Euphrates was somehow prevented from flying across the river as flood waters began to rise. But birds outside of this region were just fine.

Todd, I am sorry, but a local flood simply forces one to jump through all kinds of weird hoops and make mincemeat out of scripture. The Bible means what it says. The flood was global. The evidence of this flood is literally scattered all over the Earth in geological formations and fossil graveyards and massive coal seams, etc.. Scripture is so explicitly worded that it leaves us no room for such a theory.

So are you saying the flood covered the whole globe like a ball of water, or just "Pangea?"

Yes, the flood covered the whole globe. Obviously land that is dry is higher in elevation than water. So, if the flood covers all of the land mass, the water level in the oceans must be equal to the water level that covers the land Otherwise, the water runs off the land into the oceans, and the land is dry again very quickly. A 150 day flood is impossible unless the water is impounded.

Here is a question to consider. What is meant by, "the fountains of the great deep were opened." Where is the great deep and what did these fountains look like? Where in Mesopotamia is the evidence of these fountains opening up?

However, we do have mid-ocean rifts that circle the globe that provide ample evidence of these fountains of the great deep.

Hi Caleb: I haven't really had much conversation with a flat-earther before, so here's my first few questions.

First off I interpret "four corners of the earth", "ends of the earth", etc as figurative.

So, when I fly over the artic...I don't run into an 'edge' I just end up flying into Siberia or China. If I fly over Antarctica I don't end up at an 'edge' I end up in south America or Africa or Australia. When I fly past New York I don't see an edge, I see Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Hawaii ( if Im fortunate) then I see America again.

So no matter where I go, I never find an end, nor a corner, I never reach the edge to the 'backside' of the earth where the sun disappears for about 8 hrs...or not.

Who lives on the backside of the earth? So if the earth is flat, then at sunrise, it would be sunrise everywhere on the earth at the same time, and same with sunset. At high noon it would be high noon everywhere. The sun would be slightly one way or the other, but everyone would be in daylight and everyone would be in night at the same time.

So when we have a Lunar eclipse, why wouldn't we see an edge or a flat spot ever recorded that appeared across the moon? We see a perfectly fitting circle over the circle of the moon. We know the moon is round because we can watch it's rotation.

Why hasn't anyone fallen off the 'edge' of the earth or discovered the leading edge to the backside.

Anyway, you can see there are many problems to solve, and I am not coming at it with any science at all just simple observations any child can do or anyone who has flown in a plane may observe.

Funny thing about that equator too, once you go past it, water drains in a funnel the opposite direction, Interesting the flat earth is cut in half by an equator where the gravitational forces pull differently.

Anyway Caleb you don't have to answer all those questions, my point is simply no one can believe the earth is flat or rectangular with some kind of thickness to it because we have learned from traversing the earth every known direction and witnessed the sun rise and fall but not at the same time nor has any person in recorded history come to the 'edge' of the world so that he must turn back again.
If there were no scientists in the whole world, I would need none of them to tell me the earth is round.

A "global” flood actually makes mores sense in a flat earth/snow globe model. Of course that does not mean it is a reason to believe a flat earth model. Sorry Caleb!

But that got me to thinking in general about this thread and all of its permutations and a question came to mind:

What evidence, if any, would convince those of you who believe the earth is 6000 years old that the earth is in fact older?

You don’t seem to accept radioactive dating methods, or ice core evidence, or tree ring evidence, or other geological/astronony evidence.

So am curious if there is any type of evidence you WOULD accept, or would you always just take the position that the evidence is wrong?

But that got me to thinking in general about this thread and all of its permutations and a question came to mind:

What evidence, if any, would convince those of you who believe the earth is 6000 years old that the earth is in fact older?

You don’t seem to accept radioactive dating methods, or ice core evidence, or tree ring evidence, or other geological/astronony evidence.

So am curious if there is any type of evidence you WOULD accept, or would you always just take the position that the evidence is wrong?

Todd: All of the evidences you just suggested are man's scientific knowledge. This knowledge is incomplete and often in error. This is the way science works. Each generation is just sure that they have it right, and each subsequent generation modifies or overturns and replaces the body of knowledge when further facts become evident. Coupled with this, we have the overall anti-Biblical bias of the scientific community which has an overriding commitment to naturalism and does not want to, so to speak, let the divine foot in the door.

But scripture is absolute. God does not change, and neither does His word. When scripture makes a statement, we can take it to the bank. To accept secular science in a particular area to the degree that it makes us question and then reinterpret scripture means that we believe secular science more than we believe scripture.

You see, if scripture is modified by anything outside of scripture, then the veracity of the entire Bible is called into question. If man's theories cause us to have to say, "Well, since science says _______, then this particular scripture must either be allegorical or it cannot mean what it plainly says.", then we have opened the door for man's theories to say the virgin birth did not happen, or that Christ's atonement is only an allegory for man to be a better man. It has happened and it is happening.

You ask the question, what evidence would a person such as me accept. The answer is really quite simple. Since the Bible is absolutely explicit in the matter, then there is not one piece of man's incomplete and often erroneous knowledge that would convince me to question what scripture says. You see, if I question scripture in Genesis, then I call the entire thing into question. But I have build my entire life on Jesus Christ. His word is everything to me. It has and continues to radically change my life. I don't understand all of scripture by a long shot, but Genesis is explicit and is written in such a way that we really have no choice but to accept it or reject it as is.

By the way, just as a matter of interest. Tree rings only date back as far as the tree lived, and the oldest known tree is on the order of 4000 years in age, placing its germination at the end of the flood. Carbon dating is fraught with problems and is notoriously inaccurate, yielding really odd and varying ages for objects of known age in blind tests. In theory it sounds good, but it is a pretty terrible dating method. Not only that, but carbon dating is only "good" according to the scientific community for fairly young objects. Potassium Argon dating is believed to be more accurate by the scientific community, but it is still plagued by the same problems and dates swing wildly, requiring "index fossils" to "pick" the right date out of the huge range of dates obtained. But that is a real problem because the fossils are what the method is supposed to date in the first place. Really the whole radioactive dating system is founded on a pre-existing guess about the age of the earth. Astronomy and cosmology are a frontier of science that is still in its infancy. We have only escaped the atmosphere of the Earth since the 1960's.

Well, what you are really saying is that any evidence presented will have to be re-interpreted to fit a YE paradigm.

I was thinking that ultimately we may discover other planets that have geological features like the earth that are explained by YECs as having been caused on the earth by the catastrophic flood (eg Grand Canyon).

Will YECs then say that catastrophic floods on these other planets caused those features as well? Certainly other planets have canyons etc. caused by erosion.

It all boils down to this in my opinion. Scripture says (Exodus 20:11) that in six days God created the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that are in them. In Gen. 1 we have a very exact definition of a day as one light/dark cycle with evening and morning and an account of all that exists being created in that timeframe. After this we have exact genealogies from Adam to Jesus. There is no Biblical reason to believe that it is any other way. The Blble is clear when taken as it is written. The only reasons that can be given for any other ideas are reasons based on man's reasoning and science that cause us to question scripture and try to reinterpret it to mean other than it clearly says. So it simply comes down to this question. Am I willing to accept what the Bible says, or am I going to allow man's reasoning to take ascendency over scripture.

I have no idea what happened on other planets. Man's science cannot figure out what happened on this one, let along on the others. But one thing I know, whatever happened had to happen in the past 6000 years or so, because those planets were created during the six day creation week.

Hi Caleb: What a great spirit you have in this matter, very winning and gracious praise the Lord for that work in you.

My main problem still exists. If I fly along the equator heading straight east keeping equal distance between north and south poles I fly an elliptical ring so long as I maintain a 90 deg angle between two perpendicular points. In doing so, maintaining an elliptical flight I must come to an end or I must return to the same longitude I began.

All the world over, all flights, all satellites, all space launches do the required math in order to leave and re-enter earths atmosphere, or circumnavigate on a continuous path. There is no one that has disputed ( that I have ever heard or read) that if you start in New York and fly east, you will never need to do a 180 deg turn to return to New York, you only need to maintain the same latitude. This negates the possibility of a dome or disc because inevitably one must revert to a parabolic arc tangential to the original course. In short, ya gotta turn it around to go home.

I don't mean to sound stiff about this, but a disc or dome would never allow our current flights to occur. Now if it was the norm to come to the edge of the disc/dome and need to turn around...no one would care because it would have been a physical necessity from the very outset of flight; no elaborate coverups or wild scientific theories would ever negate the necessity to 'change course' because the dome/disc edge has been reached.

What you seem to be saying is, no elliptical fight can ever be accomplished, I must revert to a parabolic without changing course. This is an Impossibility.

Hi Caleb: I decided to visit a flat-earth vs rounders debate website, I probably read over 50 flat earth rebuttals to the rounders. I didn't find a single one persuasive. A couple of things I noticed from this website.

1. To be a flat-earth believer you must also be a conspiracy theorist concerning gravity, a government guarded "edge", curvature of the earth and roundness of both Sun and Moon.
2. You must be completely dismissive of any physics...not fancy postulates of Dr. so-and-so but gravity, light, inertia etc.
3. No one knows what's on the backside of the earth and Gleasons map is as good as scripture.
4. There is no shortage of quotations from various pilots, scientists etc that the 'roundness' of the earth is not a foregone conclusion...hence a conspiracy.

So, in getting a good dose of Flat-earth believers, rebuttals from both sides, what I did read lead me to conclude Flat-earthers do not believe you can get an accurate picture of the earth from space without it being 'rounded by flat-earth haters' ( my wording of course) and that scripture was never the focus of why the earth must be flat, rather many dubious ad-hoc reasoning and pseudo-scientific anecdote formed the true platform.

I didn't read anything that lead me to believe these folks were revealed the truth about scripture, instead it seemed more along the lines of cognitive dissonance than anything else.

None of the questions I posed to you were ever answered or even attempted to be answered. I didn't expect to see such a display of cultic belief. (This is what the Mormons and the like do, they will not believe anything other than what their church or elders tell them, no matter what it may be).

Just my opinion...and none of that is meant to reflect upon you.

At this stage, Flat earth conclusions are not scripture based, but scripture-jumping-off-points that demand literal interpretations be made to texts which do not in anyway require literal or wooden in-flexibility.

If the flat earth were as clear as Genesis 1 that would require me to take a close look at it, but, so far in what I have read and understood none of it appears to be the revelation of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. Instead poor exegesis coupled with immature thinking and fears of conspiracy adorn this teaching.

Hi Caleb: Flat earth is no doubt way off topic for this thread, if you want to pursue this in another thread then post one and I will join in. But for now, this will be my final posting on this thread on this tangential subject.

M-

It’s pretty amazing how similar your response to Caleb’s FE theory sounds in general terms like my arguments against YE.

To a strong FE proponent, no amount of scientific evidence will convince him because he need only say "but scripture says.”

That’s why I was asking if there was any evidence that Travis or other YEC would accept for an old earth and the answer is "no” because "scripture says.”

We all know what scripture says, but what does it actually mean?

I could use the same argument as what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

What do you mean by FE ?

To me there is lots of evidence for a young earth such as Polystrata Fossils or the fact that you have fossils of fish eating fish.

Engineer Spike Psarris -- Our Created Solar System: What You Aren't Being Told
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqrJ_p0eVpA

Nuclear Physics and the Young Age of the Earth - Dr. Jim Mason
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FlG7W_o7nE

We all know what scripture says, but what does it actually mean?

What if scripture contradicts things like Big Bang Cosmology or the fact of things like Lucy.

If we are dealing with the subject of Hermanuetics that is a massive subject.

I was referencing "flat earth” when I wrote FE.

I will admit there is some evidence that seems to support YE. But there is seemingly far more evidence that supports an ancient earth/universe.

Quote: """We all know what scripture says, but what does it actually mean?"""

It means scripture is what we have to deal with now. The rest does not matter.

Like asking God; who created you? Gods answer; That does not matter, I created you and I am the One you have to deal with now.

In Christ: Phillip

When I wrote my response to Caleb, I knew Todd would go "that's my argument against YEC"...

But there is a vast difference in the clear teaching of scripture regarding the creation of the world and some metaphorical texts that suggest the world is flat. The comparison could only be made between dreaming of drops of rain while the other swims in an ocean.

I do not have to deny rationality, physics or history to embrace YEC, but to embrace FE you must deny all of these...I read the proof it myself in all the varied rebuttals from FE proponents. Additionally I must torture scripture texts so that metaphor is eradicated. Is God and eagle or what? Is God a Spirit or is he actual fire? Is God a Chicken or is he eternal person? Which metaphor do we inject so as to torture the scripture and create a god that makes no sense to anyone.

Biblical hermeneutics? that's crazy talk...if the Spirit is a dove, then God is a dove.

Point is, we know what the scriptures mean, the real question becomes will we believe once we know? Obedience is always the rub not misunderstandings.

"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it." Exodus 20:11

So the Lord blessed the seventh long period of time and hallowed it?

Hi Nigel,

Good question!

One could also ask just what a "day" is. After all, each of the first three "days" of creation existed before there was a sun or moon. How long is a "day" if a day is measured by "the evening and the morning" but without a sun?

The author of Genesis even refers to the moon as a "lesser light" -- even though it merely reflects the light of the sun. I suppose that God knew that we didn't need to concern ourselves with the details.

Still, my hypothesis (well, not really a hypothesis but, rather, thing to consider) is that the "day" is based from a different point of creation relative to that perspective.

Since time is relative to a point in space, time passes differently from the perspective of each point. This was especially true given the incredible mass of creation in the moments shortly thereafter (and the shorter distance of the universe in consideration to the escape velocity of that mass).

Of course, God is not confined to the laws of physics. He merely placed us in a universe that contains such apparent laws.

At the same time, a concurrently old and young universe -- six days from one perspective of creation and billions of years from the secondary perspective -- would account for many things that lead scientists to believe in an ancient and vast universe (or the fact that light from distant stars that are many light years away has reached the Earth).

It doesn't have to be young only. It doesn't have to be old only. It can be both. Young, old or both: God is still true.