Randolf777
New Member
Not at all. Many scientists do, they just disagree with the YEC interpretation of the Bible and the way He did it.
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Scientific Creationism?
- Thread starter tyndale1946
- Start date
Randolf777
New Member
Stop? Seriously? I think it is a good idea to study both sides of a Biblical interpretation.
Sure they do, but it certainly gives them less ammunition to debate based on scientific facts. At one time, Christians believed the Sun, planets and stars revolved around the Earth. It was also believed the Earth was flat with a dome.
I can guarantee you that those people held their interpretation was based on scripture and science was wrong.
To a person with a good education in the sciences, the YEC interpretation is as weak as the flat earth belief would be to you. In fact, and I can give you quotes, many scientists have said the proof an old Earth is better than proof that the Earth is not flat. Seriously. This is because when you take upper level courses you start being exposed to facts that you can prove for yourself that shake the foundations of a young Earth. It is not brainwashing, believe me, nor is it someones interpretation of the facts. Then when you enter research, you begin to see things that you can prove yourself. Without this level of education in the sciences it is very difficult to even have a concept of the field or its complexities.
Its like trying to debate business with an MBA. You think you are winning the debate, but they are becoming frustrated because you don't even have a gasp of the subject and without getting the same education, you will not. All too often, the weaker debater thinks they have won and while the educated one knows they haven't. This was seen very clearly to even those uneducated in the sciences when a certain YEC debater claimed to be a high-school teacher would present his arguments and then brag about literally destroying college professors. Then bragging they wouldn't debate him again for that reason. When in reality they were so frustrated with the arguments they found the debate an exercise in futility.
Randolf777
New Member
Here's just one. Supernova UDS10Wil (nicknamed SN Wilson) which exploded more than 10 billion years ago was observed by the Hubble Telescope (don't remember the date). Last time I had any information about it there were 100 supernovae of all types and distances, looking back in time from 2.4 billion years to more than 10 billion years observed by the team using the Hubble for Supernova observation. Either the stars are only 6000 light years away or God just made them appear to explode when they really didn't exist. God doesn't lie.
To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge. Psalms 19:1-2.
That is besides just the fact that we can see stars and galaxies past twelve billion light-years away.
how do we know that the speed of light has always been constant? What if the speed was different before the fall?
Besides that how do they know those stars are really millions of light years away? I would be really interested in knowing how they figure that out.
Btw, that still doesn't prove a old earth...if anything it would only prove an old universe...which it doesn't.
It seems there are quite a few assumptions.
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That is a possibility, but a very remote possibility. We know that E=MC^2 works, and "C" is the propagation constant (the speed of light) so we know it is, is fact, constant.
It is called "parallax." We have a 186 million mile baseline from which to triangulate the distance to the stars.
No, it doesn't.
Quite a few assumptions made by both sides of the argument.
The Young Earth creationists assume, often based on the Ussher chronology, that the Earth is only around 6000 years old. But Ussher's chronology has been shown to be deficient.
And the Old Earth creationists/evolutionists assume that God forgot the purpose of the stars when He created the universe.
Genesis 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:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
It would take a pretty stupid god to forget why he make the stars.
Not sure about any deficiencies in Usshers chronology. But I do find it interesting that we only have about 6000 or so years of recorded human history.That is a possibility, but a very remote possibility. We know that E=MC^2 works, and "C" is the propagation constant (the speed of light) so we know it is, is fact, constant.
It is called "parallax." We have a 186 million mile baseline from which to triangulate the distance to the stars.
No, it doesn't.
Quite a few assumptions made by both sides of the argument.
The Young Earth creationists assume, often based on the Ussher chronology, that the Earth is only around 6000 years old. But Ussher's chronology has been shown to be deficient.
And the Old Earth creationists/evolutionists assume that God forgot the purpose of the stars when He created the universe.
Genesis 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:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
It would take a pretty stupid god to forget why he make the stars.
This is an overly broad statement and therefore not true in any sense.
Ussher's first error was that he believed that the lists of people in Genesis 5 and 11 are chronological. They're not. His second error was to believe they are genealogies. They aren't. They are ethnologies.
In Matthew 1:8 Joram is called the father of Uzziah (KJV: “Joram begat Uzziah”). But we see that the Greek verb gennao sometimes refers to ancestral relationships, and not only to the father-son relationship.
According to 2 Kings, Joram’s son was Ahaziah (8:24); Ahaziah’s son was Joash (11:1 - 21); Joash’s son was Amaziah (12:21); Amaziah’s son was Azariah/Uzziah (15:1).
The relationship which Matthew describes with the verb gennao is not father-son, but great great grandfather - great great grandson. It is clear that Matthew’s genealogy of Christ is ethnological, not chronological.
One more instance of the wider use the original writers made of the verb “to bear, to beget.” In Exodus 6:20 we read: “Amram took him Jochebed his father’s sister to wife; and she bare him Aaron and Moses.” Anyone reading this statement for the first time would surely draw the conclusion that Aaron and Moses were the actual sons of Amram and Jochebed. It is with amazement, then, that we turn to Numbers 3:17-19 and 28 and discover that in the days of Moses, Amram’s family, together with the families of Amram’s three brothers, numbered 8600! “Unless we are willing to grant that the first cousins of Moses and Aaron had over 8500 living male offspring, we must admit that Amram was an ancestor of Moses and Aaron, separated from them by a span of 300 years!” (The Genesis Flood, 1961, John C. Whitcomb, page 481).
John C. Whitcomb was visiting professor of Old Testament when I was a Seminary student.
As to how much history we have. Jiahu symbols date to 6600 BC, and Vinča signs to 5300 BC. Add in the 2000 years AD and we get 8600 and 7300 years ago respectively.
That represents the biggest challenge to young-earth Creationism. But, we don't know for a fact that it took light 12 billion light years to get here. There have been many proposals to address that. Consider, what if the Earth were near the center of a cluster of galaxies 12 billion light years across. And, beyond that cluster, there's nothing, or at least nothing significant for a great distance. There would be the net gravity of the entire cluster at the perimeter of the cluster and no net gravity from the cluster where the Earth is located.
Given the above situation, and applying uncontroversial science, there would be gravitational time dilation relative to distance, red-shifting light and giving light the time it needs to get to a young Earth.
At least it's more scientifically plausible than the Big Bang.
Randolf777
New Member
God has fine tuned this entire universe for us. If the speed of light were any different digestion could not occur. This is pretty complex, but I could get into it if you wish. The big reason is that E=MC^2. If the constant "C" (light speed) were to increase, then energy would increase at the square of the rate. Even increasing the speed 50% would kill everything living and scorch the Earth. Even most young earth creationists have thrown out that idea.
Radio telescopes around the world are linked electronically to simulate a dish the size of the entire Earth. By using this method extreme angular accuracy can be achieved and we can measure parallax since 1999 out to 100 million light years.
In 1990, the galaxy NGC 4258 was measured using this technique at 23.5 million light years away with an accuracy of about 7%. This measurement was used by astronomers to re-calibrate their other measurement methods for extreme ranges.
There are other methods such as measuring the motion of masers in a disk of gas containing water molecules and orbiting a supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center. Another easier one to understand is determination of the type of star and mass using spectrometry to determine actual brightness then measuring observed brightness to calculate the difference due to cosmic dust the light has to pass through. There are many other methods and they all agree with each other with a certain percentage of error, plus (as I said above) they have also been calibrated using the parallax method.
Ice core samples from the "Dome C" site has set the record in measuring 800,000 years back, while the "Vostok" site has measured 400,000 years by annual rings. These have been calibrated by at least two known dates of ancient volcanic eruptions and they truly are "annual" rings.
Drilling samples from the Mediterranean Sea show layers of salt thousands of feet thick. Between each layer is a layer of sedimentary rock. There are fossils in the sedimentary layers, which means the rock wasn't just already there. This means that the sea got blocked from the ocean several times in the past and dried up. For the amounts of salt to be deposited, it would take millions of years of evaporating and refilling. These layers could not have occurred from a single global flood.
How about the salt cliffs of Dover? They are made over long periods of time from planktonic algae which had to die over time and sink to the bottom when that area was underwater for a long period of time. Or Dolomite which has to form only in fresh water the same way when diatoms die?
It seems there are quite a few assumptions.[/QUOTE]
There are a lot less assumptions in science than the YEC wants to admit.
Randolf777
New Member
Time does not have an affect on the speed of light. The only thing it does affect is the measurement of the speed. Gravity can bend light, but it doesn't change its speed. This is why atomic clocks in the GPS system run faster and have to be corrected. It's the measurement that changes not the speed.
Besides, if it did and red-shifted it, for it to travel 100 million light years in less than 6000 years, it would no longer be light, in fact it couldn't even travel because its frequency would be near zero. Besides, if it were to travel faster it would be blue shifted.
Since visible light's frequency is 430–770 Terahertz (Billion cycles per second), red to blue, then just doubling the speed would throw red outside of the visible spectrum or put it at 860 THz. This would be invisible ultraviolet. If the star were only 100 million light years away (which is the maximum we can measure with parallax) it would still take 50 million light years to get here.
And finally, if it could change the speed, stars only 100 million light years away would have little gravitational effect because they are close to Earth in this sphere of stars (as you describe it). Only being near the edge of this universe of stars would you see a significant drop in total gravity.
I didn't say the speed of light changed. I offered a scientifically plausible explanation of a young Earth and the distance of the stars without appealing to any controversial mechanisms. Your whole post is irrelevant to what I said.
They had told us a particular supernova exploded 10,000 years ago. How then, did the Chinese see it in AD 185? The answer is a case study in scientific inference.
Supernova remnants (SNRs) are shells of material expanding outward from stellar explosions. Presumably, one can tell how long ago a star exploded by measuring the velocity of the expanding shell and extrapolating it backward in time. In the case of RCW 86 in Centaurus, the calculated time of explosion was 10,000 years. According to Space.com (9/26/2006), astronomers now realize it was witnessed by Chinese astronomers 1,821 years ago. This means the earlier date was off by over 80%. What happened?
From the Chandra X-ray data, they now believe the expanding shell rammed into interstellar material, slowing it down and making it pile up. Extrapolating the current speed backward linearly was based on a flawed assumption.
One of the most widely dispersed SNRs in northern skies has a similar tale to tell. The Veil Nebula arches into graceful loops over a large region in Cygnus. Earlier estimates of its age were in the tens of thousands of years. In 2001, however, Sky & Telescope (2/2001) reported a surprise. By comparing Hubble views with photographs taken in 1953, astronomers recalculated its age at 5,000 years.
Light echoes from two "ancient" SNRs in the Large Magellanic Cloud were reported in Nature (12/22/2005) to be merely 410 and 610 years old.
Astronomers use supernovas as age and distance indicators. It's hard to have confidence in the pronouncements of professionals who consider it normal to be off by 80% or more. Would this be acceptable in other fields? Yet upsets in astronomy are common.
http://www.icr.org/article/supernova-shell-shock
Supernova remnants (SNRs) are shells of material expanding outward from stellar explosions. Presumably, one can tell how long ago a star exploded by measuring the velocity of the expanding shell and extrapolating it backward in time. In the case of RCW 86 in Centaurus, the calculated time of explosion was 10,000 years. According to Space.com (9/26/2006), astronomers now realize it was witnessed by Chinese astronomers 1,821 years ago. This means the earlier date was off by over 80%. What happened?
From the Chandra X-ray data, they now believe the expanding shell rammed into interstellar material, slowing it down and making it pile up. Extrapolating the current speed backward linearly was based on a flawed assumption.
One of the most widely dispersed SNRs in northern skies has a similar tale to tell. The Veil Nebula arches into graceful loops over a large region in Cygnus. Earlier estimates of its age were in the tens of thousands of years. In 2001, however, Sky & Telescope (2/2001) reported a surprise. By comparing Hubble views with photographs taken in 1953, astronomers recalculated its age at 5,000 years.
Light echoes from two "ancient" SNRs in the Large Magellanic Cloud were reported in Nature (12/22/2005) to be merely 410 and 610 years old.
Astronomers use supernovas as age and distance indicators. It's hard to have confidence in the pronouncements of professionals who consider it normal to be off by 80% or more. Would this be acceptable in other fields? Yet upsets in astronomy are common.
http://www.icr.org/article/supernova-shell-shock
Why would God be lying when He created a mature, functioning universe?
Would you also accuse Him of lying for creating Adam as a mature, functioning man?
Would you also accuse Him of lying for creating Eve as a mature, functioning woman?
The animals? Trees? In fact the entire ecosystem?
How else would God create the universe? How else should he have created Adam? As a helpless infant? Eve as a helpless infant? The animals as helpless infants? The trees as mere germinated seeds?
I am sorry but that argument seems to me to be just a bit silly.
Randolf777
New Member
So, what exactly are you saying? That the clocks around the edge of the Universe run faster? Okay, assuming this is true; then you have the problem of stars just 50,000 light years away since their average gravity is going to be pretty much the same as ours compared to the 12 or so billion light years of stars stretching out.
Or maybe I just don't understand what you are saying.
If the clocks really do run faster out there, they are still that far away and it takes that long for light to get here for our clock on Earth regardless of how slow it is. To them, it would still be the speed of light they just wouldn't know their clock is running faster.
Randolf777
New Member
He could do that, but I don't think he would invent exploding stars that happened before the creation. New technologies allowed an astronomer (he wasn't really as astronomer he was a physicist who knew how to develop more sensitive digital sensors for the telescopes). He was in charge of a project where for a period of time (a month of so) they ran scans of different areas of the sky to see if they could actually detect a star explosion. All of these were a tremendous distances from Earth. Within one week he had documented close to 100 actual explosions. Based on the spectrum analysis the time of the explosion would give off light and its decay factor could be known and they fit the analysis and dimmed right when they should have. (As long as they caught it appearing in the first place, which are the only ones they documented).
So, I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know what Psalms 19:2 says.
Only if he had formed them with arthritis, bad backs, hemorrhoids, rotten teeth and smelly feet. ;-)
If the trees had tree rings showing different climates and made up of environmental balances of chemicals and nutrients; and the animals with arthritis, parasites and failing kidneys.
I don't think he would create ice layers with 800,000 annual rings in Antarctica which can be calibrated using known volcanic eruptions from man's past due to trapped gases.
I don't think he would create layer after layer of salt under the Mediterranean with interspersed layers of fossil filled sediment from it being cut off from the ocean several times with not enough time to account for with a YEC interpretation.
I believe the big bang from a singularity is an excellent example of the creation event. Matter, space and time come into existence and begin to coalesce, first forming stars, which produces elements up to iron and because of this they explode. In the Nova produced they form the rest of the elements that are made naturally. Then planets begin to form (which just happen to be round because gravity pulls it all together that way). Etc. Etc. God is smarter than people want to imagine by building such a functioning universe from the moment he spoke it into existence back then.
And no, I wouldn't call God a liar if he created the Earth in 2 nanoseconds and the rocks say made in China in the year 10,000,000 BC. I assume that with infinite knowledge that he could certainly do that and do it without lying, but I honestly don't think he did it that way, no more than I believe he created it in six days.
Genesis 1:1 says he created the Heavens and the Earth making it pretty clear the Earth was created last. The rest of the chapter is from the perspective of the Earth.
I am sorry but that argument seems to me to be just a bit silly.
Could be
.
Albert Einstein, commenting on the Michelson/Morley experiments as addressed by Lorentz/FitzGerald told us that time dilation, the difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from a gravitational mass or masses, is a phenomenon associated with speeds near C.
If that is the case (and we have evidentiary indications that it is) the photon of light, traveling at C, would only experience around 3 months of subjective time while traveling 10 million plus light years. Remember, our Constant is as observed from a relatively stationary viewpoint.
In an experiment conducted back in the 1980s the European Geosciences Union discovered that cosmic ray bombardment on the upper atmosphere produced short lived radioactive daughter products with a half-life so short they could not reach the earth's surface.
Imagine their consternation when they discovered those short lived daughter products were, in fact, making it to the earth's surface, a journey too long to make in their very short existence.
The solution? The particles were traveling so fast they were experiencing a time dilation phenomenon of around 3 to 1 giving them sufficient time, from their near C velocities point of view, to reach the earth's surface.
So, from that perspective, science does not preclude a relatively young earth.
However, again, in my opinion, that is not the best answer. The best answer is that God is not an idiot so He did not forget why he was making the stars and forget to create the light between the stars and the earth to satisfy his goal of "to shine upon the earth."
QED
If that is the case (and we have evidentiary indications that it is) the photon of light, traveling at C, would only experience around 3 months of subjective time while traveling 10 million plus light years. Remember, our Constant is as observed from a relatively stationary viewpoint.
In an experiment conducted back in the 1980s the European Geosciences Union discovered that cosmic ray bombardment on the upper atmosphere produced short lived radioactive daughter products with a half-life so short they could not reach the earth's surface.
Imagine their consternation when they discovered those short lived daughter products were, in fact, making it to the earth's surface, a journey too long to make in their very short existence.
The solution? The particles were traveling so fast they were experiencing a time dilation phenomenon of around 3 to 1 giving them sufficient time, from their near C velocities point of view, to reach the earth's surface.
So, from that perspective, science does not preclude a relatively young earth.
However, again, in my opinion, that is not the best answer. The best answer is that God is not an idiot so He did not forget why he was making the stars and forget to create the light between the stars and the earth to satisfy his goal of "to shine upon the earth."
QED
Why not, if that is a normal function of a mature universe?
Are those the only indication of maturity? I was physically mature when I was about 20 years old. I did not suffer from arthritis, a bad back, hemorrhoids, rotten teeth or smelly feet. In fact I am 70 years old and do not suffer from arthritis, a bad back, hemorrhoids, rotten teeth or smelly feet.
Why do you assume those are not the normal indication of a mature ecosystem?
Again, why do you assume such is not the normal indication of a mature ecosystem?
Again, why do you assume such is not the normal indication of a mature ecosystem?
Why not? Do you assume for God to be God he must do things your way?
Sapper Woody
Well-Known Member
I am only going to respond to one part of your post, because that's all I have time for right now. I will preface my post by saying that I am a proponent of the "Apparent Age Theory".
They discovered that plants and trees inside this closed eco-system grew much faster than those outside. However, they were not healthy, and could not stand up under their own weight. The reason is that they were not exposed to bad weather and winds. Because of this, they never developed stress wood. For a tree to be a healthy tree, it has to have stress wood that will allow it to hold up under gravity, and it develops this stress wood by (no surprise) stress.
I personally believe that God made healthy trees in the garden, able to stand up under their own weight. This means that trees created just minutes before had apparently sustained stress (wind, etc), which had torn down their wood and rebuilt it into stress wood. So, even though the trees were just minutes old, it appeared as if they had undergone negative circumstances in the past.
This does not mean that God is lying. It means that He created a mature world. To follow this logic, I believe that there was oil in earth when God created it. Does that mean that He's lying, saying that dead animals decomposed and decayed? No. it means that He provided for us before we even knew what we needed.
It is no stretch of the imagination at all to say that if God created trees to appear to have undergone stressful events (which He would have had to), that He would have created other "apparent" stressful events, like a star's explosion.
I am a Creationist first, and a Scientist second. But I believe that they are reconcilable; that is, if science shows something to be true, and it doesn't line up with the Bible, then either the science is wrong, or my understanding of the Bible is wrong. The Bible is always correct. But sometimes as fallible men our interpretation of it is flawed.
In my curiosity about the colonization of Mars, I was trying to formulate how many plants would be needed to sustain enough oxygen for a person to live. I stumbled upon the Biosphere 2 project, in which people lived in a closed eco-system for 2 years. The project was met with mixed success and reviews, but that's not my main take-away from it.
They discovered that plants and trees inside this closed eco-system grew much faster than those outside. However, they were not healthy, and could not stand up under their own weight. The reason is that they were not exposed to bad weather and winds. Because of this, they never developed stress wood. For a tree to be a healthy tree, it has to have stress wood that will allow it to hold up under gravity, and it develops this stress wood by (no surprise) stress.
I personally believe that God made healthy trees in the garden, able to stand up under their own weight. This means that trees created just minutes before had apparently sustained stress (wind, etc), which had torn down their wood and rebuilt it into stress wood. So, even though the trees were just minutes old, it appeared as if they had undergone negative circumstances in the past.
This does not mean that God is lying. It means that He created a mature world. To follow this logic, I believe that there was oil in earth when God created it. Does that mean that He's lying, saying that dead animals decomposed and decayed? No. it means that He provided for us before we even knew what we needed.
It is no stretch of the imagination at all to say that if God created trees to appear to have undergone stressful events (which He would have had to), that He would have created other "apparent" stressful events, like a star's explosion.
I am a Creationist first, and a Scientist second. But I believe that they are reconcilable; that is, if science shows something to be true, and it doesn't line up with the Bible, then either the science is wrong, or my understanding of the Bible is wrong. The Bible is always correct. But sometimes as fallible men our interpretation of it is flawed.