Evolutionism vs the Gospel

" http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/Magazines/docs/v12n1_boyle.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/358.asp "

Still claiming support from young earthers from before there was a theory of evolution, eh?

You know my poll of four year olds finds that Santa IS real. What should I wish for?

"The scripture on Jesus is just as literal as the scripture on creation. If you can dismiss one, then you can dismiss the other."

The fallacy of the slippery slope in action.

"Who had time to do this?"

So, let's get this straight. This is an admission that you cannot name a single one, right?

"The facts are the same. However our interpretation of the facts differs."

I have given you umpteen opportunities to reinterpret for us. You seem to be unwilling. We even have separate threads and all now.

"Evolution has taken the opposite approach. They start with the pre-supposition that the earth is billions of years old and that man evolved from single cell organisms. The possibility of the Grand Canyon forming must conform to that world view - so forming within the last 6000 years is thrown out as a possibility."

There is where you err. Only YEC throws out a possibility at the beginning. OE allows for either a young or an old canyon. It allows for either a gradual or a catestrophic canyon. It allows the evidence to speak. The YECer tells the evidence what it means instead of letting it speak.

 

Gup230

My initial comments pertain only to interpretation of scientific facts. I never said that one cannot believe in a young earth. If you choose to take the bible as the final authority then good! You can rightly invoke the Word of God as a trump card for anything.

My problem pertains only to the interpretation of scientific facts. I contend (as did EVERY biology, physics, and chemistry professor at UVa when I was in college) that the scientific facts we have at present (and we obviously don't have all of them) suggest an old earth.

If one chooses to simply believe a literal Genesis then more power to him/her. But let him/her not venture into the realm of scientific investigation unless he/she is prepared to deal with things honestly.

After becoming saved in early med school I reappraised my position on creation (YEC vs OEC). I read tons of YEC stuff. But I could see gaping holes in all of it - and I really DID want to believe it!!

So my point is thus. I'm not any better than anyone else but I think I've got a better grasp of scientific methods than most who have not formally studied science in a postgraduate setting. As such I'm saying that we need to be careful how this is presented to young believers. A kid who goes to a good university and studies science IS going to see holes in the YEC arguments - big ones!!! If he/she has been taught to put faith in YEC -ology as a cornerstone of the bible's validity then he/she may be in for a crisis of faith. If we teach them that there are several theories and we really don't have all the facts but there is a lot of evidence for OEC then they can make their own decisions.

 

I think I share Charles's experience. Reading all the YEC material and wanting to believe it. But it was so full of holes. It made me angry that men claiming to be doing the will of God would do such things. SO I looked into the competing theories. They were much more honest. Sorry that I have to say that when comparing Christian actions to other areas.

 

Interesting question... lets look to see if the Bible has any answers, or information that could lead us to an answer:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/AnswersBook/continental11.asp

Psalm 104:6-7 describes the abating of the waters which had stood above the mountains. Verse 8 most naturally translates as, ‘The mountains rose up; the valleys sank down,’ implying that vertical earth movements were the dominant tectonic forces operating at the close of the flood, in contrast to the horizontal forces dominant during the spreading phase.

I would imagine that such a catastrophy as the world breaking open and flooding... causing the continent to break into continents and cuasing the entire earth to flood would be a pretty dramatic geologic event. I would estimate that possibly billions of animals could have become quickly fossilized as well.

What a fantastic question. Creationists have an answer for it, however.

Remember that on Day 1 God created Light. He separated that light from the darkness. Some creationists believe that this may be describing a WHITE HOLE (a black hole in reverse). Remember that in a black hole, gravity is so intense that not even light can escape it's event horizon. Time is extremely relative within a black hole as you go from the center of the black hole to the edge of the black hole. So too, in a white hole.

Check this out:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/405.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2003/1006cosmology.asp

Even secular scientists like this idea -

http://www.pubmedcentral.com/articlerender.fcgi?artid=208737
Here is the Abstract to their paper:

We construct a class of global exact solutions of the Einstein equations that extend the Oppeheimer–Snyder model to the case of nonzero pressure, inside the black hole, by incorporating a shock wave at the leading edge of the expansion of the galaxies, arbitrarily far beyond the Hubble length in the Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) spacetime. Here the expanding FRW universe emerges be-hind a subluminous blast wave that explodes outward from the FRW center at the instant of the big bang. The total mass behind the shock decreases as the shock wave expands, and the entropy condition implies that the shock wave must weaken to the point where it settles down to an Oppenheimer–Snyder interface, (bounding a finite total mass), that eventually emerges from the white hole event horizon of an ambient Schwarzschild spacetime. The entropy condition breaks the time symmetry of the Einstein equations, selecting the explosion over the implosion. These shock-wave solutions indicate a cosmological model in which the big bang arises from a localized explosion occurring inside the black hole of an asymptotically flat Schwarzschild spacetime.

The main deviations here is that the 'big bang' cosmology contains a universe center and an edge. They talk about everything coming from a white hole.

also check their oral description - http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~temple/articles/

http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/AnswersBook/continental11.asp

Before the 1960s, most geologists were adamant that the continents were stationary. A handful promoted the notion that the continents had moved (continental drift), but they were accused by the majority of indulging in pseudo-scientific fantasy. Today, that opinion has reversed—plate tectonics, incorporating continental drift, is the ruling theory. (Interestingly, it was a creationist, Antonio Snider, who in 1859 first proposed horizontal movement of continents catastrophically during the Genesis flood. The statements in Genesis 1:9-10 about the gathering together of the seas in one place, which implies there was one landmass, influenced his thinking.)

Geologists put forward several lines of evidence that the continents were once joined together and have moved apart, including:

*

The fit of the continents (taking into account the continental shelves).
*

Correlation of fossil types across ocean basins.
*

A zebra-striped pattern of magnetic reversals parallel to mid-ocean floor rifts, in the volcanic rock formed along the rifts, implying seafloor spreading along the rifts.
*

Seismic observations interpreted as slabs of former ocean floor now located inside the earth.

The current theory that incorporates seafloor spreading and continental drift is known as ‘plate tectonics.’

Diamonds fast and hard
Techniques for making diamonds artificially in just a few months by subjecting carbon to heat and pressure are already used commercially (see, e.g., Grisly gems, Creation 25(1):9, 2002).

Now researchers can transform graphite into ‘ultrahard’ pure diamond in only a few minutes under static high pressure and temperatures of 2,300–2,500°C. With their extreme hardness (being polycrystalline, they are even harder than single-crystal diamonds), these transparent artificial diamonds could be used in industry where real diamonds are currently used to cut and polish other hard materials.

Nature, 6 February 2003, pp. 599–600.

Given the extreme heat and pressure deep within the earth, natural diamonds did not need millions of years to form, in direct contrast to common evolutionary ideas about diamond formation.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v25/i3/focus.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1402.asp

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i3/focus.asp

Is it all over, for white cliffs of Dover?

Rampaging limpets (small sea-shells that cling to rocks) are undermining the white cliffs of Dover, whittling away the coastline at a surprising rate. It seems that as limpets creep across rocks, eating algae, they also eat chalk. An obscure scientist last century had suspected that limpets were lowering the foreshore at Dover by 1.5 mm (about 1/16 inch) a year, but no one believed him.

Recently, researchers have measured the amount of calcium in limpet faeces and the total actually equals 1.3 mm of erosion per year — thought to account for about 30% of total natural erosion.

At Brighton, engineers had assumed chalk rocks made sure foundations for artificial sea walls, but these walls are collapsing after just ten years.

Meanwhile residents have moved an Eastbourne lighthouse to rescue it from an encroaching cliff edge, which has advanced more than 21 metres (70 feet) in 165 years, an average of about 13 cm (five inches) per year. However, these erosion rates are dwarfed by the average two metres (over six feet) per year erosion of Suffolk coastal cliffs. Over the past 800 years, the sea there has claimed about 1.6 km (1 mile) of land, including the entire medieval city of Dunwich, with the last of its 12 churches toppling over the cliffs in 1919.

The Sydney Morning Herald, January 15, 2000, p. 35.
The Express (UK), February 17, 2000, p. 42.
Rough Guide Travel: Dunwich, <http://travel.roughguides.com>, March 31, 2000.

Such erosion rates contradict the belief that landforms are hundreds of millions of years old.

Ah... to my knowledge these are volcanic... the Flood provides a great mechanism whereby catestrophic erruptions may have occured, however.

Dunno... they would have been part of the one large continent though, right?

While these are all 'OFF TOPIC' in this thread... it's still interesting stuff.

 

LOL... Awesome!


It was another communist, Marx, who said "change a people's history and you can change them into anything". That is pretty much what Evolution is attempting to do.

 

OH MY GOODNESS! I read that and my jaw just about hit the floor? Am I arguing with a Christian or an atheist here!!?

Lets give you a direct answer shall we?

No - there are no objections to evolution outside 'religion' or some 'holy book' (or God's Word as I like to call it... just a personal choice there really). However... you failed ... as has Galatian to answer my direct question. If you take the Bible on it's own... without what we 'know about science' does it suggest millions of years... or do you get the impression that creation happened in six days about 6000 years ago?

... ?

If you have a grain of honesty in your entire being, you will conclude that without the influence of science or evoltion, the Bible supports entirely and unequivocally a six day recent creation.

I would submit to you then... that because the Bible supports special, recent creation... regardless of what evoltuion or science says... the Bible is right.

Absolutely I agree 100% this is accurate (you might get an argument from Galatian). However... it is important to point out that they made the mistake of interpreting the evidence they saw outside the framework of what the Word told them was true. They did this intentionally. They wanted to establish a history based solely on the evidence they could see... disregarding the scripture purposefully.

You are preaching to the choir here... I was simply trying to snap The Galatian back into reality. His version of 'revisionist history' told him that man has always considered the earth old.

The point is that the modern theories are just that - MODERN... coming after the popularization of a naturalistic history by Darwin. Galatian tried to make it appear that it has always been that way, and that the YEC interrpetation of the Bible is a new interpretation that adds to scripture something that was not there before. In fact, the YEC view is the view that has been there since the beginning when it was dictated by God himself.

Let me 'shed some light on that' for you (hehe).

Dictionary.com says:

1. The first or early part of the day, lasting from midnight to noon or from sunrise to noon.
a. Pertaining to the first part or early part of the day; being in the early part of the day; as, morning dew; morning light; morning service.
3: the first light of day;


Lets go another step further into the absolute shall we?

Merriam-websters defines DAY as:
1 a : the time of light between one night and the next b : DAYLIGHT

Gen 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
en 1:4 And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Gen 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Gen 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
Gen 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also.

OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

So there was day and night before the sun and moon... but God created the sun to be dominant during the day... and the moon to be dominant during the night. WOW.... so that means that the Light God created actually determined the day and night... not the sun. The sun was to signify daytime and nightime. OOOOOOOHHHHHH!

So the DAY is a specific period of time. When the Sun is created on Day 4, God says that the sun rules the day and the moon rules the night. Wow... so now we have a couple of signs that we can see so that we know the relative meaning of day in Genesis 1:5! The confirms itself over and over and over and over...

...

and over and over and over again. A day is a literal day. Moreover, the language of morning, evening, number, day lets us know that grammatically there cannot be another meaning either.

YET AGAIN... I have shown you FROM SCRIPTURE how the YEC view is advocated, whereas you have no scriptural basis still for your statements!

In fact, it is very relevant. The 'flat earth' concept did not come from scripture and is not present in early Jewish culture. This shows the origin of the 'flat earth' mythology... again... this is extra or outside scripture.

Some early people... such as yourself and The Galatian... were quick to try to incorporate Man's ideas into the Bible and try to find Biblical support for the humanistic ideas. This is a marvellous example of WHY the church and christians should NOT capitualate the word with humanistic, worldly, man's ideas (such as evolution).

In fact, in a plain reading, I read that the earth is a cicle... in my mind that generates ZERO flat or dome like images. I think of a ... circle.

Even the best 3D rendered picture of the earth looks like a circle. Just because an object is a circle doesn't mean it it has no depth. These people lived in a 3 dimentional world. If you said, for example that a person's head was round like a circle... every one would know that you didn't mean a 2 dimentional flat object. Why? Because everyone lives in a 3 dimentional world where objects have depth. So in the most simplistic terms... when you say circle... you mean like a rock or a person's head. Objects that exist in reality have depth. Objects in their reality had depth. I very much doubt they were ever walking along and picked an apple off a tree and said... 'oh rats... I accidentally got one of those 2 dimentional flat disk apples'. Their entire world and existance was full of dimention and depth... what could possibly give them the impression that their world was a flat round disk? NOTHING. Moreover, they had only to look up at the sun and moon and see spheres in the sky.

You see... these are all physical observations, but they are observations made WITHIN the context of scripture... not outside of it.

Cute, but God knows your heart anyway. God says he made the world in literal days and confirms it over and over. God says the whole world flooded and confirms it over and over. Yet you do not believe either of these things.

Well let me clear it up for you. If you look ONLY at the evidence without consideration of the Scripture, it will lead you to the conclusion of Evolution. However, if you wish to be correct, you must realize that things didn't come about naturalisticly only. They happened as the Bible describes. The Bible is ultimate truth, and it must be considered the primary truth to draw correct conclusions. If you look at ONLY the evidence naturalisticly, it mounts up so that you MUST overlook items like the impossibility for entropy to decrease on it's own... or the impossibility for information to arise on it' own. These must be overlooked in to adhere to the large body of evidence that says they did. However, if you consider that evidence again withing the context of scripture and withing the framework that the Bible is true, you must draw very different conclusions about all of the evidence. Suddenly, the evidence you see makes sense and there are no contradictions. Suddenly you can indeed reconcile observation of entropy and information into origin history.

If you exclude the Bible - as science has agreeed for the most part to do.. then the conclusions drawn are the only logical conclusions. However, if factored in as the PRIMARY concern and contributing factor, all evidence must be re-interpreted under that framework, and a wholely different picture emerges.

I have no problem with your science or logic. I have a problem with your framework, your interpretation, and your 'start point'.

If you believe the BIble is true, then your science goes in a very different direction.

Instead of simply being logical and evidenciary... you become correct, and border on truth.

[ July 30, 2004, 07:31 PM: Message edited by: Gina L ]

 

"Interesting question... lets look to see if the Bible has any answers, or information that could lead us to an answer:"

Wrong answer. I think the question was about an original mountain.

"I would estimate that possibly billions of animals could have become quickly fossilized as well.

Yes, but as shwon to you, not in the manner that we find the fossils. For instance, the flood model that you have advocated, in addition to boiling the oceans three times, suggests that the velocity of the waters over the continents would have been 130 to 260 ft/s. This would have destroyed the animals and plants before they could turn into fossils. Fossils reveal details about their formation. Some were buried in slowly forming sediments of very fice material. Not what you get settling out at 260 ft/s. What about the Liaoning fossils which are buried in ash, not sediment? There are others, too. Why do many fossils show evidence of predation or scavenging when you claim this did not happen before the flood?

"What a fantastic question. Creationists have an answer for it, however."

You do? News to me.

I have been over with oyu before what is wrong with Humphreys. It boils down to someone who does not understand and who has never had training in relativity attempting to formulate a paper on relativity. I'll just link you to a critique at a Christian website this time instead of going over the whole thing again.

http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/unravelling.shtml?main

"Even secular scientists like this idea -

http://www.pubmedcentral.com/articlerender.fcgi?artid=208737
Here is the Abstract to their paper:"

Sounds to me like they are proposing an alternative to inflation. Where in there do you get any idea that they are proposing anything to allow a young universe? I do not see it. Spell it out for us. I think the full paper is available there. Tell us all about it.

"Geologists put forward several lines of evidence that the continents were once joined together and have moved apart, including:"

Yes, but you cannot account for the amount of energy required to move the continents in a short period of time.

"A zebra-striped pattern of magnetic reversals parallel to mid-ocean floor rifts, in the volcanic rock formed along the rifts, implying seafloor spreading along the rifts."

This you really cannot explain since the pattern matches the current rate of movement and matches the dates from radioisotopes.

"Such erosion rates contradict the belief that landforms are hundreds of millions of years old."

AIG using uniformitarian assumptions. How hypocritical of them.

If they would bother to pick up a geology text, they would find that the cliffs of Dover have only been eroding for about 10,000 years. But, given their track record, I bet they did know that and choose to try and make a dishonest point instead.

Besides, you still cannot tell me where all the chalk came from in the first place. It takes a long time to grom and very still waters to settle out. And remember your model says 260 ft/s. Boulders will not settle out of that.

"Ah... to my knowledge these are volcanic... the Flood provides a great mechanism whereby catestrophic erruptions may have occured, however"

Ah but you cannot explain why their is a linear relationship between the radioactive dating ages of each volcanoe and their distance from the currently erupting volcanoes. You cannot explain why there is such a clear pattern of erosion from east to west, either. Nearest the currently erupting volcaoes, the islands are taller and rockier, having been subject to less erosion. Going west, they get lower and lusher as erosion has had more time to work on them. Still further west, they have been eroded right back into the sea. Or are you suggesting incredible erosional rates for these islands but all those people living there just happen to miss it? If the erosion was from the flood, they would all be eroded the same.

 

"OH MY GOODNESS! I read that and my jaw just about hit the floor? Am I arguing with a Christian or an atheist here!!?

Lets give you a direct answer shall we?

No - there are no objections to evolution outside 'religion' or some 'holy book' (or God's Word as I like to call it... just a personal choice there really). However... you failed ... as has Galatian to answer my direct question. If you take the Bible on it's own... without what we 'know about science' does it suggest millions of years... or do you get the impression that creation happened in six days about 6000 years ago? "

Take it easy. I was allowing for the fact that some religious people other than CHristians claim a young earth based on their beliefs. I did not want you to short change the question by giving me a young earth Muslim and claiming that it was not because of the Bible.

Still did not give us an example though.

 

It appears that our creationist bretheren have abandoned evidence and are now merely calling names.

Sooner or later, YE creationists always do this.

 

It seems to me that any means is justified by the predetermined endpoint.

Belief in literal YECism is NOT a prerequisite for salvation and has nothing to do with the gospel.

I really wish you guys knew what a negative impact this kind of stuff has on witnessing.

 

They support the same concept as humphrey's physics... that everything started with a white hole. Such would have a center and an edge. Time advances more quickly as you go towards the edge, more slowly towards the middle.

The 'big bang' theory has long held the belief that there is no center and no edge to the universe. The Slaon Digital Sky Survey team has develped the best three-dimentional map of the universe to date, mapping over 200,000 galaxies up to two billion light years away. This map (which you can see here) shows clear concentric circles as you get farther and farther out from the center. This fits with the Humphreys and smoller/temple view that there was an explosion of finate mass with a center and an edge. The density distribution of galaxies WAS expected to increase with distance in a 'big bang' universe. On the map, the galaxy density seems to oscillate with distance hence the circular structures.

Time, as it were, would be a result of the relativity between objects near the center and objects near the edge.

Therefore, objects in our universe that are not as close to the center of the white hole as we (our galaxy is very close to the center) would age more rapidly. By this, then, millions or billions of years may have passed for some of these galaxies relative to a few thousand years on earth.

For example, the age of the earth (according to scientists) is an assumption based on the ages of extra-terrestrial observations.

I gave you a direct answer instead. Science has done the best it could do on it's own. It has, obviously come up short, however, as the Bible gives us the truth.

Call it a control group... testing your work. See if science alone can get you close to the absolute truth in the Bible... it can't. It fails and is off my many orders of magnitude (billions of years instead of thousands, for example).

My friend, you have YET to post a single shred of Biblical evidence backing up your claims.... while our Biblical evidence is quite verbose.

Belief in YEC is not a pre-requisite for salvation, however it does have a LOT to do with the Gospel. The entire Gospel is based and founded on Genesis. To undermine Genesis undermines the whole of scripture.

Let me ask you... does pruning branches or killing the roots of a tree have a bigger impact on it's survivability?

Clearly, Humanists would not be able to defeat the Gospel by sniping at Jesus or individual doctrines. However, if you cut the tree off from the roots it dies regardless of the heartyness of the tree. You folks seem to be content to protect the fruit on the tree as termites devour and destroy the root of the tree. You fail to realize that the fruit is a result of the roundation in the roots. That is where it get's its sustenance... that is where it COMES FROM and is BORN OUT OF. Without it, the fruit cannot stand on it's own because the fruit is a part. Cut off the root and the fruit eventually dries up... that is exactly what we see in the Church of England as a result of their capitulation to evolution.

That is the reslut we see in the Marble voting at the Jesus seimiars.

I really do feel bad for people who detach Genesis from scripture. They detach God from the Real World and promote a view of him that any good agnostic can appriciate. What you are really doing is inviting God to please stay out of your day to day lives. You've delegated him to a morality policemen who comes out on Sundays and then goes back on the shelf for the rest of the week.

 

Actually, Barbarian pointed out to you that the text itself says that it cannot be six literal days (something first pointed out by Augustine nearly 1600 years ago)

But perhaps you forgot. Here's your reminder.

 

An interesting parallel to this is Language. According to the Bible all languages came from God. Adam and Eve, for example were created with the ability to speak. At Babel, God broke up the ONE language into MANY languages. These have all since gone through changes. Where did the original information come from, however? Just as in our DNA, the original information for languages came directly from God. He created that way. The physical laws of entropy and information loss (copy mistakes and mutation) took over from there to bring us to where we are today.

 

"while our Biblical evidence is quite verbose."

Biblical evidence is not scientific evidence. Like I keep saying - if you believe the bible because of what it says then fine. What I am speaking of is the science - not the biblical passages.

Your scientific explanations are full of big holes - and I don't think you even realize it. But what I'm trying to tell you is that people with a science background WILL realize it. So if the bible is your trump card then use it! But use it appropriately and leave science to scientists.

 

"They support the same concept as humphrey's physics... that everything started with a white hole. Such would have a center and an edge. Time advances more quickly as you go towards the edge, more slowly towards the middle. "

This is not a true statement and you know it. You have already been given a response to this nonsense from the authors of the paper themselves. Let me remind you.

http://www.youdebate.com/cgi-bin/scarecrow/topic.cgi?forum=3&topic=1413

Would you now like to tell us either why the authors of the paper are wrong or withdraw the assertion?

"The Slaon Digital Sky Survey team has develped the best three-dimentional map of the universe to date, mapping over 200,000 galaxies up to two billion light years away. This map (which you can see here) shows clear concentric circles as you get farther and farther out from the center."

The map agrees with inflation not Humphrey's. The size distribution of structures that you see as you look from the present back into time agrees exactly with what would be expected based on the fluctuations in the CMB due to inflation. If you disagree, here is another opportunity to provide a better interpretation.

"I gave you a direct answer instead. Science has done the best it could do on it's own. It has, obviously come up short, however, as the Bible gives us the truth."

So, you cannot find anyone who argues for a young earth without already having that bias? Planty of OEers are Christians.

"Just as in our DNA, the original information for languages came directly from God. He created that way. The physical laws of entropy and information loss (copy mistakes and mutation) took over from there to bring us to where we are today. "

You have demonstrated a distinct misunderstanding of entropy but maybe you can try again to tell us how it is relevent. There is no evidence in the genome that there was once a rich genome that has given us today's species through "information" loss. If it had happened that way you should be able to point to a "kind" and identify genes A,B,C,D&E, for instance. In five different species that came from a kind, for a related trait that made each slightly different, each species would have one of the five genes active and the other four would be pseudogenes. What we actually see is that the differences are in the active genes themselves. The variation is not from loss from a rich genome but from mutation and selection.

 

Bob and Gup,

Here's another way of putting it:

We could make a major discovery next week - one which would cast doubt on all of evolution's framework. I'd be open to the possibility!

But as of today I can HONESTLY say, as a Christian AND a scientist, that the weight of evidence greatly favors an old earth.

You can still disagree with my assertions that the earth is old - but do it on scriptural grounds. Believe me when you put forth some of this stuff about entropy and lysozyme you make all of us (Christians) look like idiots to those in the scientific field.