Science Has Not Ultimately Proven Millions of Years
The age of the earth, as determined by mankind’s fallible methods, is based on unproven assumptions, so it is not proven that the earth is billions of years old. 1
This unproven age is being used to force an interpretation on the language of the Bible. Thus, mankind’s fallible theories are allowed to interpret the Bible. This ultimately undermines the use of language to communicate.
Evolutionary scientists claim the fossil layers over the earth’s surface date back hundreds of millions of years. As soon as one allows millions of years for the fossil layers, then one has accepted death, bloodshed, disease, thorns, and suffering before Adam’s sin.
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If I were a 'believer' I would be SO embarrassed by the pathetic quality of this abject piece of 'reasoning'. Sorry.
scientific evidence do you need? I mean, we've got writing from before 4000 years ago, evidence of mankind's making things over 10,000 years old.
Using logic to apply consistent artistry to the mass of Creation, we may assert the existence of The Artist, Almighty God!
If we exercise faith toward God, by believing that He exists in the very manner that He says that he does, then we may logically apply His consistent Character, including His Artistic Signature in Creation, to all things that God, the Artist, creates.
If we believe that Adam was created by God as The Bible asserts, then we may, also, presuppose that Adam was not created as an infant since, of course, there would have been no other humans avaliable to have cared for the needs of an infant.
The obvious need for Adam to be self-sufficient (along with the need for verbal communication with God during daily walks in the Garden of Eden, and enough creative intelligence to name all of the animals) would imply that Adam's creation required "apparent age."
Using other words, on the day that Adam was created, his "apparent age" could have been anywhere from 13 to 30 years of age.
Though these numbers may seem arbitrary, there is precedence for this range.
In various cultures around the world, a boy receives a rite of passage into manhood about the age of puberty. In Judaism, the Bar Mitzvah marks the beginning of a man's participation in the Law of God as a "Son of the Covenant."
Also, in the Jewish nation (it is my understanding,) that 30 years of age marks full maturity and the right to lead (if wise, as well) in the community of faith.
To relate this information to the literal Six Days of Creation, (and the lack of the allegedly millions of years of evolutionary development,) is a simple matter of applied logic.
If your world view can allow for the existence of apparent age in the creation of Adam (for multiple valid and utilitarian reasons,) then your world view can allow for the plausibility of the Earth being created with the appearance of having existed already for millions of years as well as having been created by The Omnipotent God in SIX literal DAYS! :)
Your argument breaks down if your audience rejects the notion that Adam was created ex nihilo with the "appearance of age." Did Adam have liver spots? Scars? Any accumulation of chemical byproducts? A belly button? Memories of childhood? These are all not just signs of maturity but also signs of specific events that occurred in the past. Would it not be deceptive for god to create something with the artifacts of a fake history?
Our planet and our universe are littered with artifacts of specific events occurring before six thousand years ago.
With all due respects, here is my Bottom Line, though I run the risk of being arrogan and "closed-minded," I only write for the Judeo-Christian World View.
This is mainly due to a time-factor...I only have one life on Earth in which to learn. Therefore, I don't have time to explore any other world views because there is still so much for me to learn from this one.
Your point is well-taken. My applied logic only works for those who see the world as I do...
However, I will address a couple of your concerns.
First, since it is impossible for God to sin, God would never be deceptive. Yet, THAT once given, we may now turn our attention to humans who do something similar. It is openly taught on HGTV!
It's the creation of faux surfaces, like faux rust and faux marble. For our discussion faux rust is the most germaine. These artists create rust and various apparently aged surfaces through chemical processes that could be expected to leave various types of residue.
If The LORD chose to do something, like that, He could do an infinitely better job than we humans can.
My point in my original comment was not to state some superior knowledge, but to explore a probable hypothesis that explains logically (at least to my mind) how the world works.
Thanks for just a little room for letting a guy "think out-loud." :)
"Therefore, I don't have time to explore any other world views"
In other words, religion is easy and science is hard. So you choose religion and ignore science.
AIG: The age of the earth, as determined by mankind’s fallible methods, is based on unproven assumptions, so it is not proven that the earth is billions of years old
Anytime science is involved, there is a possibility of error. However the vast amounts of different methods applied, all leading to the same conclusion cannot be ignored.
As such AIG has fallen victim for what Augustine exposed as foolish Christian behavio
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Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
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include the transmission of the Biblical text. AiG's argument rests on accepting the text is perfect and their understanding is perfect.
I'd rather go with the "fallible" apparent age of the Universe given by cosmic background radiation and recesion of galaxies than the errors that accumulate in a human book.
>>>dvunkannon:"I'd rather go with the "fallible" apparent age of the Universe given by cosmic background radiation and recession of galaxies than the errors that accumulate in a human book.
>>sologos: "cosmic background radiation" and "recession of galaxies" are measurements contingent upon the inherent limitations of our present technology and present concept of time and space
But what have ancient scriptures ultimately proven?
AiG decries scientists for making "unproven assumptions" while making many of their own. The most significant are the following claims.
1. The Bible is infallible
2. AiG correctly understands the Bible
Both of these have not been demonstrated by AiG and are, in fact, not provable. The Bible is rife with vague messages and contradictory passages. Only by the special pleading of organizations like AiG do these passages form a coherent whole, yet the truths AiG found in the Bible are wholly inconsistent with the reality of the world around us. What reason do we have then to trust AiG's interpretations of Biblical passages?
Scientists has proven beyond any reasonable scientific doubt that our planet is billions of years old. If scientists were making bad assumptions, we would expect independent dating methods to give us wildly conflicting results, yet independent dating methods all agree. There is currently no scientific dissent whatsoever in favor of a significantly younger earth.
I highly suggest the following article for any Christian with concerns over the reliability of radiometric dating methods.
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/RESOURCES/WIENS.html
>>>antimatter:"Both of these have not been demonstrated by AiG and are, in fact, not provable. The Bible is rife with vague messages and contradictory passages."
>>sologos:You are ignoring centuries of good scholarship, including that in the last century specifically engaging the arguments of Historical criticism and so-called "higher" reasoning.,
>>> antimatter:"Scientists has proven beyond any reasonable scientific doubt that our planet is billions of years old."
>>sologos: Might it not depend on where in the universe you are taking your readings?
"You are ignoring centuries of good scholarship, including that in the last century specifically engaging the arguments of Historical criticism and so-called 'higher' reasoning."
No, I'm not. I've read both. I find the historical criticism approach more palatable, but it still seems like a lot of over-analysis of ancient mythology to me.
"Might it not depend on where in the universe you are taking your readings?"
No, because isotope decay occurs at a predictable rate. If an observer were exploiting a relativistic effect to make the Earth appear younger in his own frame of reference, then he would also see that time itself was passing proportionally faster on the Earth. Our planet has been here for at least 4.5 billion years, measuring from the planet's own frame of reference.
"You are ignoring centuries of good scholarship, including that in the last century specifically engaging the arguments of Historical criticism and so-called 'higher' reasoning."
>>>antimatter:"No, I'm not. I've read both. I find the historical criticism approach more palatable, but it still seems like a lot of over-analysis of ancient mythology to me."
>> OK, well this now sounds more like opinion.
>>sologos:"Might it not depend on where in the universe you are taking your readings?"
>>>antimatter:"No, because isotope decay occurs at a predictable rate. If an observer were exploiting a relativistic effect to make the Earth appear younger in his own frame of reference, then he would also see that time itself was passing proportionally faster on the Earth. Our planet has been here for at least 4.5 billion years, measuring from the planet's own frame of reference."
>>>sologos: My statement is addressing your belief that the bible contradicts the scientific age of the earth.I am suggesting a possible reconsiliation of scripture with present day scientific findings. I bring up relativity as regards the location from where the biblical statement is being made. The scripture is silent as to which locale in the spacetime continuum, the Author of the account was measuring time from on the first day of creation. 24 hours in a low gravitational field goes a bit quicker than one day on earth. Likewise, the evening and morning of the first day near, say, the center of the universe during the first day of expansion, might be equivalent to billions of years more peripherally. Even now, the age of the earth, by whatever scientific determination, assumes an eathly observer, and does does not generally take into acount that an observer from Betelgeuse disagrees with this age. Some scientists believe that the universe may have early been expanding at a rate which was, pardoxically, several times faster than the speed of light. Thus an earth that is billions of years old may be compatible with six days of creation. Scripture actually hints at this discrepancy when it speaks of a morning and evening before earth is clearly revolving around the sun, not that the human scribe could possibly have understood the implications.
The age of the earth beyond the six days of creation is, moreover, not so clearly alluded to in the scripture. It is not simply the account of the days of creation that people use to interpret a young earth, but the various geneologies. These geneologies are not so easily decipherable, as the linguistic analyses of the same has begotten a variety of different interpretations for the age of "Mankind", mostly an inhouse debate. The bible is not, of course, written as a scientific treatise but that doen't mean that it can not be reconciled to the natural universe.
I reaize that this explanation means little to one who views the whole thing as a myth to begin with, but perhaps some day you might want to know that there are answers.
"The scripture is silent as to which locale in the spacetime continuum, the Author of the account was measuring time from on the first day of creation."
Are you sure? Take a look at Genesis 1:2. If you must insist on forcing the narrative into a "materialist straight jacket," as Dr. Hurd described it, then it certainly does not appear that the observer was at a great distance. The passage states that god's spirit was hovering over the oceans, and presumably god was the observer.
"Even now, the age of the earth, by whatever scientific determination, assumes an eathly observer, and does does not generally take into acount that an observer from Betelgeuse disagrees with this age."
Any observer in the known universe would have similar estimates for the age of our planet. An observer on Betelgeuse could make a crude estimate of the earth's age by comparing our sun with other main sequence stars. Furthermore, they could precisely measure the rate at which time passes here by running light from our star through a spectrometer. If our planet were positioned in a gravitational field such that 4.5 billion years here would appear as 6 days to someone else, then they would find light from our star to be dramatically redshifted.
Incidentally, if we were positioned in such a gravitational field, we would expect all starlight outside that field to be dramatically blueshifted. That is not consistent with observations of the heavens above us.
>>>antimatter:"Are you sure? Take a look at Genesis 1:2. If you must insist on forcing the narrative into a "materialist straight jacket," as Dr. Hurd described it, then it certainly does not appear that the observer was at a great distance. The passage states that god's spirit was hovering over the oceans, and presumably god was the observer."
>>sologos: To believe that infinite God would be confined to any one location at any one time would indeed be to put God into a "materialist straight jacket" The measure of time could have been assigned to anywhere inside the universe. One thing for sure, time was and continues to be passing differently in different parts of the universe. From whose perspective is the universe 14.2 billion years?
>>>antimatter:"Any observer in the known universe would have similar estimates for the age of our planet.".
>>sologos: We are speaking of 2 different things, antimatter. Even if it were possible to precisely calculate the amount of time that has passed at another location in the universe, it would not change the the fact that the amount of time that has passed at the observer's locale is different.
>>>antimatter:"Incidentally, if we were positioned in such a gravitational field, we would expect all starlight outside that field to be dramatically blueshifted. That is not consistent with observations of the heavens above us."
>>sologos: Please clarify how this negates relativity.
"One thing for sure, time was and continues to be passing differently in different parts of the universe. From whose perspective is the universe 14.2 billion years?"
Time does pass at different rates at different locations, but that variance follows very specific mathematical equations. The Lorentz transformation converts between two reference frames traveling at a constant relative velocity. Similar transformations exist for gravitational time dilation. (See the Schwarzschild metric.) My point being: You cannot manipulate time as you please to suit your interpretation of the Bible. Unless you wish to confine god the observer to the center of a black hole, the observable universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old as measured from most frames of reference therein.
"Please clarify how this negates relativity."
It doesn't negate relativity; my example was derived from it. But first I must apologize, as I had my examples reversed. In an attempt to explain distant starlight on a young earth, creationists sometimes argue that the earth must be at the center of a massive gravitational field. This light would be blue shifted. The reverse is true in your case: We would expect dramatic redshift from any location in the universe where god supposedly made his observations of a 144-hour creation.