What did change your mind?

... Or they had a digestive system that enabled them to be omnivores and progressively lost the genetic information over time leaving them with limited ability to draw nutrition from plants. You assume the starting point to be herbivore. You ignored the possibility that some or even all animals were omnivorous before the fall.

 

BTW, you said OEC. Is that your position or theistic evolution?
I assert that God created. The fact taht God created is not in question. How God created is the issue that we part ways on.

If we were turning up clearly human fossils like arrowheads in a burial mound then your question might have more merit.

But before I would undertake where fossils do or do not appear, we would have to deal with the "timeline".

Accuracy of timeline or not, the fact is that jurassic, triassic, and cretaceous creatures to not date anywhere near hominids. Even if the current suppositions of the timeline were wrong, the evidence is clear that the ear of himonids was a dramatically different era than jurassic animals.

We would also have to discuss what constitutes the science and art of interpretting/classifying/interpolating fossil remains.
I'm talking about simple dating of fossils in relation to nothing but each other, without regard to any existing evidence out there.

I would also submit that, assuming a literal interpretation of Genesis, the pre-flood human population was relatively small with most human evidence being created in local disasters in the years following the flood.
Where's the evidence for this?

Certain rules such as, and maybe especially, the range of acceptable ages for the earth are not negotiable.
Not true at all. Models on the age of the earth have changes many times. Science is not afraid of changing models to fit the evidence.

For instance, evolution is said to be ambivalent toward God or religion... but that only last until you try to use God to explain or limit explanations of something in the natural world.
You're confusing science and philosophy. Science doesn't attempt in any way to explain "who dunnit", only how it was done.


They would disagree that they get academic money and creationists don't? If so, they would argue incorrectly.
I knwo of two fundamentalist universities that give grants for creation science research. Their names escape me at the moment, but they exist. Also, The University of Southern California has given grant money for the study of creation science in the past.

Anyone who rejects evolution looks at the evidence and determines that it means something else. If it were as you say then evolution could rightly be called "fact" as no other explaination would be valid.
Nope, anyone who rejects evolution does so categorically, prior to looking at the facts. When one looks at the facts objectively, they appear to support an odl earth with varying species occurring over time. There is no evidence that all the animals of the earth existed at one time, and then dies out gradually from that time forward.

...what they [the Hebrews] believed is not the issue. What the text says is. You said that Genesis 1 says the earth is flat then cite interpretations of nature as the proof.
As I said earlier, the Hebrews were describing a flat earth when the Genesis account was written. If you imagine a flat earth, and read the Genesis account, you'll find that it fits their belief rather well.

Additionally, other biblical verses make more sense of it is understood that the writers believed the earth was flat. For example "he who sits upon the circle of the earth". The Hebrew word for circle here is a flat platter shapped "disc". The Hebrews believed the earth was a flat disc shaped earth, as the diagram I mentioned indicates.

[ June 30, 2003, 07:12 PM: Message edited by: Johnv ]

 

You mean like Adam and Eve? The first shed blood came AFTER the fall so Adam and Eve ate veggies and fruits before sin entered the garden.

Diane

 

You assume the starting point to be herbivore. You ignored the possibility that some or even all animals were omnivorous before the fall.

Why would the need to be onmivours if they did not eat meat, unless they were designed to eat meat before the fall? If they ate meat before the fall, then they killed, or ate dead things.

However, there are onmivoures today. What makes them such is their physical makeup. If an animal was omnivourous befoer the fall, but only carnivourous today, then that means there was a physical change:

Omnivours have teeth that can grind both animal and plant material. They also have digestive tracts long enough to grind plant material.

OTOH, carnivours don't have teeth to grind vegetation. They have scissor-like teeth to cut through flesh. Additionally, their digestive systems are relatively short. If their tracts were longer, then the flesh in their systems would begin to rot prior to being excreted, resulting in food poisoning, and ultimately, the death of the animal.

Unless there was a physical evolutionary change in carnivours after the fall, then they could not have survived before the fall without eating flesh.

Omnivours and herbovours, otoh, would have survived the fall. But still, why omnivours existed prior to the fall makes no sense, since omnivours are designed to also eat meat.

 

Gen1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth6 upon the earth, wherein [there is] life, [I have given] every green herb for meat: and it was so.

The Hebrew word translated "meat" is oklah, which doesn't mean flesh, but rather "food" or "consumption". The Hebrew word for flesh is basar.

 

Adam and Eve are fine. Look at yourself. You are fine to eat whatever you wish. You are an omnivore. You have a blend of traits that allow you to eat a variey of foods. A carnivore does not. Their whole bodies are fine tuned to capturing, eating, digesting and making use of meat. They cannot do so with plants.

 

Fine, have it your way. They started out as omnivores and evolved to be carnivores. This would not be a matter of losing genetic information. You would start out with a generalized animal and would turn it into a very specialized animal. Teeth would no longer be jacks-of-all-trades, they would be very specialized for ripping meat. As an example, look in your own mouth. You are an omnivore. Which teeth could you remove and become a great killing machine (using your teech)? Look at your nails, you think they could turn into a set of retractable claws through loss of information? No, in both cases you would need to evolve new versions of these structures, the existing would not do. Now repeat that for most structures and systems in the body.

So, show me where I can find a fossil of a omniverous lion or t rex.

 

To finally have an on topic post to this thread...

Before I begin, I still would love to hear from someone who converted from theistic evolution to YEC and what evidence convinced them. I think that would be interesting and insightful to see what in evolution led someone who accepted it to turn from it.

I grew up in what I expect is a fairly typical Southern Baptist church. I do not ever remember creationism itself being taught but parts of it were hit upon as part of other subjects. Enough was said that I had the same distrust of anyone who promoted evolution or an old earth that many of you exhibit. I thought there was something evil about them.

At the same time I was a very curious child. I liked to read the encyclopedia for fun. My grandmother, who was the person most responsible for eading me to Christ and who played the organ in our church, recognized that I was pretty smart and encouraged me. I can remember in kindergarten, my grandmother giving me newspapers to read to her. She also had National Geographic delivered to her house for me to read when I was there. (I loved the pullout maps. I think I still have a big pile of them somewhere.) I must have ben young when this started because I can remember reading the big story on the space shuttle before they launched Columbia and I was eight when that happened.

But his led to a very strong curiousity about the world and universe. I have always enjoyed reading about such and for most of my life I just compartmentalized it such that I could satisfy my desire for information and I could put that that disagreed with my worldview off to the side somewhere.

Finally a few years ago I realized that there was a conflict nad that I should look in to it. Immediately I was struck by how poor the arguments for a young earth were. So many of them I could just shoot down based on the basic knowledge of science I had picked up en route to my chemical engineering degree. And at the time I was in agreement with their conclusions. I was first shocked and anger quickly followed. Why were these people trying to defend God with such obvious untruths?

And the more I looked, the more sordid it became. Not only did many of the claims not make sense, but different groups of creationists make claims that were in such stark contrast to one another. In addition, so many were arguments against evolution and not evidence for a young earth.

The one that really pushed me over the edge was entropy / 2nd Law of Thermo. I'm no expert in thermodynamics but I could see that there nothing about thermodynamics says that evolution was not possible. The lay description of entropy as "disorder" was being turned into an attempt to use disorder in a more general sense. And there was complete ignoring that the entropy of a system always increasing only holds for a closed system. The earth is not closed, we get a huge input of energy from the sun. The energy of the universe is increasing but that does not preclude local decreases of entropy. This is where I started to really get the feeling that these were being dishonest. If they knew enough about thermodynamics to argue fluently, then they were being deliberately dishonest. If they did not know enough, they were acting as if they did which is another kind of dishonesty.

From that point on I took everything from a creationist with a grain of salt and looked into every claim on my own.

And what I found was that the counter arguments for evolution made much more sense and were much more coherent. When you would go to look up the facts for yourself, it always seemed that the creationist had been hiding something or spinning something. The oppostion seemed much more straight forward.

Issues around radiometric dating provides several sets of examples. There was the one were they claim that a mammoth dated at sevel different ages. You find the paper and it turns out that it was different animals dated in the same paper. There are a whole lot of example of creationist talking about recent lava flows being misdated and when you find the paper the claim is demonstrated to be false. I can give you some references if you like. And then there is always the claims of assumptions that are not always assumptions for all methods of that cannot be demonstrated to be bad assumptions.

And this all leads to the issue of quote mining. I have seen so many out of context quotes and quotes from people who accept evolution and an old earth being twisted to mean something else that these kinds of quotes do nothing be throw up alarm bells from me. If you want to quote for me, please show me the entire statement or don't bother. If you want to give me a one liner from a paper, you better be prepared to also give me a link to the whole paper. And of course, out of millions of published papers and public lectures the creationist are able to pull out a full difficult stamements but then will ignore the mountains of evidence and statments from the same people. For a good example of what I am talking about, look up on any creationist website Darwin's statement about the evolution of the eye and then go read it in context.

In summary, it is the quality of the evolutionist arguments compared to the creationist ones that leads me to accept an old earth. The dishonesty of some of the creationist leaders really hurts their credibility.*

*Before you get all mad at me, that is my opinion only and I am not talking about the people here. I think you honestly believe what you post and are not out to deceive anyone. I do think you should make an effort to check out claims before you post.

 

Yes it would. This is so basic I am surprised that you missed it. We do it with dogs and horses and various animals on purpose. It is done in nature frequently as certain genetic characteristics become liabilities and others become advantageous.

Yes. Animals within a kind with teeth more suited for ripping meat would thrive. The others would not be able to compete as their young became prey and their birth rates could not keep up.

These were likely never part of a human's genetic make up. Man never had the ability to seize prey with his mouth and rip it nor retractable claws. He didn't have them and for survival's sake he didn't need them.

There is more than one successful adapt and survive model in nature. Not all animals became carnivores nor stayed/became herbivores.

How do you know they weren't? Teeth aren't the only factor and aren't even definitive in determining an extinct animal's diet. How would gorillas be classified if they were extinct as opposed to what we have observed?

 

How do you know they weren't?
You're making assumptions with no basis other than supposition.


Teeth aren't the only factor and aren't even definitive in determining an extinct animal's diet.
Nope. You're right. They're not difinitive. However, they're the largest contributing factor, next to an intact digestive system. And on that note, there have been found fossilized stomach contents. The contents are consistent with carnovours, not omnivours. But back to teeth, the T Rex's teeth are incapable of grinding vegetation. The stomach contents support that. As far as teeh go, you simply don't find vegetation eaters with carnivourous teeth. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share it.


How would gorillas be classified if they were extinct as opposed to what we have observed?
Gorillas are omnivourous. Their teeth are consistent with omnivourous animals. Come to think of it, all homonids and primates without tails are/were omnivourous.

 

As is anyone who says the size and shape of teeth always indicate diet, as is anyone who says that fossils can be dated by the geologic column, as is anyone who says that radiometric dating is accurate past the range of known history, as is anyone who says mutations and microevolution inevitably point to macroevolution, as is anyone who says that Genesis is allegory,....

I stated a possibility... but I am honest enough not to dictate it to you all as "fact" when I know that it cannot be proven as such.

 

Then, you admit that you're making assumptions without fact.

I, otoh, admit to no such thing. I admit to making supposition based on evidence. You, meanwhile, are refuting carnivour evidence without evidence to back up your claim.

 

Please John. That is not what I said nor intimated. I said I was stating possibilities. Animals do adapt by the emphasis of certain genetic characteristics. Insects do not develop immunity to insecticides through evolving new genetic information. They do it because some traits are emphasized and others are minimized and possibly lost altogether.

We have living examples of the process I am describing.

As stated above, I have living evidence, not speculation about what fits within the evolutionary framework. BTW, I am still waiting on your evidence to demonstrate that Genesis is allegorical rather than literal.

The Red Panda is an example of an animal with carnivore like teeth but an herbivore diet. Black Bears can survive without meat. If deprived of meat over extended periods of time, it is quite possible that they would become genetically disposed to teeth more like an herbivore if there was an environmental advantage.

You jumped on my methods but I am doing in an simplistic way what evolutionists do in a complex way. I am proposing ideas that can work under the known natural laws. Donate some funds and maybe we can get a case study going to disprove/prove my idea .

 

BTW, I am still waiting on your evidence to demonstrate that Genesis is allegorical rather than literal.

The fact that Jurassic, Triassic, and Cretaceous animals do not appear anywhere near homonids in a timeline, no matter what your assumption is fossil dating. If Genesis were liter, they would overlap. Even if you assume the earth is 6 to 10 thousand years old, you have hominids appear late, and sauria appearing early, with a great gap in between.

How about the fact, and I do mean fact, that, by using simple R14 carbon dating (we can easily date animal bones to 20,000 years old with pinpoint accuracy, since R14 dating is accurate to 50,000 years.

How about the fact, and I do mean fact, that animals bones pulled out of local beds in my region, like the La Brea tar pits just a few miles from me, consistently date from 6000 to 12000 years old, yet those same animals are absent from other parts of the world?

How about the fact (and I do mean fact) that Australia has animals that have traits that don't resepble animals anywhere else on earth? If Genesis were literal, we'd be finding kangaroos in Turkey, or at least animals that resemble kangaroos.

I'm still waiting for evidence that supports the idea that Genesis is literal.

 

As a great man once said "There you go again..." It is not "fact". It again relies on unproven and unprovable assumptions. Namely those coming from an uniformitarian view of natural history.

See the above, and I do mean carbon dating is based on assumptions.

BTW, those same animals are absent from other parts of the world? You mean that all animals do not inhabit all parts of the world or even a small region at the same time? Why that goes at least part of the way to countering your arguments about the segregation observed in the fossil record.

Why? That logic does not work at all. The fact that groups of animals were segregated by whole 'kinds' does not contradict Genesis in the least.

What you listed still makes your modernistic interpretation of natural history the standard by which you interpret and judge the Bible. You still have cited no biblical proof for your contention at all. I believe it is literal first and foremost because the biblical writers treat it as if it were, it is written as if it were, and at no point does God's Word declare that it is not.

Mark 10 for instance would have been a great opportunity for Jesus to set the record straight. He instead reaffirms that God specially made the man and woman. Acts 4:24 says that God made the heavens and earth and all that are in them. Rev 4:11 says "all things".

The NT as well as the OT consistently assigns an active role to God in creation- not the passive one given to Him (without one shred of biblical support) by theistic evolution. The Bible describes a personal Creator just as certainly as it describes a personal Savior.

 

It [Carbon 14 dating] again relies on unproven and unprovable assumptions. Namely those coming from an uniformitarian view of natural history.
On the contrary, carbon 14 dating is highly accurate for short periods of time of 50k or less, because of the exacting decay of the atom decay amongst living things.

...those same animals are absent from other parts of the world? You mean that all animals do not inhabit all parts of the world or even a small region at the same time? Why that goes at least part of the way to countering your arguments about the segregation observed in the fossil record.
Not at all. This supports migration and isolation. I could post pages worth on the subject, but you will dismiss them all categorically. OTOH, if you post evidence for creation, as Helen has from time to time, I will take the time to read it and consider it.

Why? That logic does not work at all. The fact that groups of animals were segregated by whole 'kinds' does not contradict Genesis in the least.
If groups of animals were segregated by "kinds", and they as a "kind" migrated to Australia, then where is the fossil evidence supporting migration? There is none.

What you listed still makes your modernistic interpretation of natural history the standard by which you interpret and judge the Bible.
No, it's sufficient to support the idea that Genesis is a non-literal truth, but not literal fact.

You still have cited no biblical proof for your contention at all.
That's a straw man statement. The Bible is silent on the subject. The Bible was not written for the purpose you're asserting.

I believe it is literal first and foremost because the biblical writers treat it as if it were, it is written as if it were, and at no point does God's Word declare that it is not.
It was said before it doesn't matter if the Jews or the Bible writers believed the earth was flat. Hence, it doesn't matter if the Bible writers believed Genesis was literal.

Mark 10 for instance would have been a great opportunity for Jesus to set the record straight. He instead reaffirms that God specially made the man and woman.
Jesus was making a point about divorce, not about origins of species.

Acts 4:24 says that God made the heavens and earth and all that are in them. Rev 4:11 says "all things".
This does not negate an OEC view.

The NT as well as the OT consistently assigns an active role to God in creation- not the passive one given to Him (without one shred of biblical support) by theistic evolution.
Regardless of how everything came into being, God is creator, and had an active role as such. An OEC view doesn't change this.

The Bible describes a personal Creator just as certainly as it describes a personal Savior.
OEC views don't say differently.

 

http://edsitewa.iinet.net.au/perthzoo/lesserpandaredpanda.html

Red Pandas have broad teeth for masticating bamboo. To your credit:"Because the lesser panda has the digestive system of a carnivore it cannot digest wood fibre. It therefore has to eat large amounts of bamboo every day in order to survive." They manage to get by on mostly plants.

 

Sure, we breed animals for desirable traits. But, after thousands of years of breeding dogs, we still have not produced one with a mouth full of teeth specialized for eating plants.

I'm glad to see you are coming around on this natural selection thing. So, in a world without meat eating, why would a pre-flood omnivore have specialized adaptations for hunting down, killing, and eating other animals?

You are catching on. Organisms will evolve to exploit a niche if they can. But you stil have not shown that you can take general herbivores and evolve carnivores in a short period of time after the flood nor that you could do it by using on the loss of genetic information. Remember, too, that the gene pool would not have been very diverse after that bottleneck from the flood.

Gorillas would likely be correctly classified as omnivores. A lion or t rex would be unable to survive on plant matter. I can see the t rex now going around and swallowing large chunks of tree branches because he is unable to chew plant matter at all and then trying to get enough nutrition from the unmasticated food to survive.

 

When I grew up I was taught YECism, although not scientific creationism. I accepted that viewpoint in general. I thought the earth and universe were only a few thousands of years old. I did not, however, think that the six days was to be taken literally. From as early as I can remember I think I thought that God would have done it all instantaneously and that it wouldn't have taken him a day to do each day's work.

The first I remember hearing of the earth's 4.6 billion year age came ag age 8. In a book entitled "The Answer Book of Geography" I remember reading (I think in an article on volcanoes) about the age of the earth and how it might have once been molten. I did not believe it, since the time chronology obviously contradicted that of the Bible.

(Actually I think I might have been exposed to old earth ideas earlier. I had a booklet on dinosaurs from the New York World's Fair. I had been very interested in the dinosaurs when I visited; but I don't think I had ever read the booklets.)

When I was about 10 or 11 I remember reading in a book (The Wonders of Physics--I don't kknow the author) about nucleosynthesis in supernovae and stars. I was impressed that it might be possible to explain the presence of the very chemical elements from simple principles. I think I was very struck by the idea, but it's hard to say whether or not I was convinced. I remember about the same time reading about uranium lead dating. I was able to raise the standard creationist objections (nonconstant half life, initial presence of uranium, nonclosed system), but although not absolutely convincing the basic idea seemed plausible. And there was nothing similarly plausible indicating an earth thousands of years old. And then there was astronomy and its vast distances which would have been meaningless in a thousands-of-years-old earth. I'm pretty sure that biological arguments had little or nothing to do with convincing me. I don't think I had any understanding of natural selection.

In junior high I remember reading about the possibility of a closed but unbounded universe, and that idea fascinated me. But I knew enough to realize that the whole thing wouldn't mean anything if the universe were only thousands of years old.

Although my science edutation was sympathetic to a young earth, we did see movies from the local utility company. Some were about fossils (they were building a nuclear power plant at Calvert Cliffs, where lots of amateurs collected fossils). I think it was in one film that I first heard of the steady state model, where hydrogen was continuously injected into the universe. I think I thought that that was very arbitrary. The Bib Bang, on the other hand, seemed simple, and I was aesthetically drawn to the possibility of a closed, cyclic universe (which would have been the closed, unbounded one I had read of earlier). I think this happened while I was in the ninth grade.

At the same time I began to learn something of Biblical criticism. For Confirmation, as is traditional, I received a Bible of the version of my choice. I chose The Jerusalem Bible because it had a different flavor from most other contemporary translations. (The JB is not derived from the Tyndale/KJV tradition, so it reads somewhat differently.) In any event, the introduction to books and footnotes introduced me to the documentary hypothesis and Biblical criticism generally. I was also learning something of these in my Old Testament class in tenth grade religion. Anyway, I saw concretely that it was possible to understand Genesis and the Bible from a perspective of a community of faith without taking much of it as historical.

That community of faith was important to me. I understood that *I* could hold such interpretation, but then I seemed to myself to be rather different from others, an outlier.

Something else might have been at work. I understood my own faith community (Lutheran) to have been based strongly upon the Bible. Catholics, I thought, would happily ignore or even subordinate the Bible to tradition. But then I saw that Catholic scholarship integrated the Bible consistently with a scientific world view. In my own faith community, in contrast, those views were in tansion, and frequently opposed to each other. It occurred to me that our Biblical scholarship might not be all that it needed to be. That didn't cause a crisis, I think, because at the time there was great conflict between "moderates" and "conservatives"in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In developing my position in favor of historical criticism (as I learned it was called) I was merely, insofar as my faith was concerned, aligning myself with one church faction.

Strangely enough, tenth grade biology barely mentioned evolution, but did not explicitly promote creationism. I think the only significant discussion of evolution came in my World History class, where the teacher, when lecturing on prehistoric people, mentioned that the story from Genesis wasn't meant to be taken literally. I think that was the first "authority figure" close to me associated with the church who had definitely taken such a position. (I'd heard of others, but didn't know them personally.)

I am sure that I had abandoned creationism by the time I got to college. However, I think that prior to college I thought my (pro-evolution, or at least old earth) viewpoint was a minority viewpoint not only in my own faith community, but among Christians generally. I was pleased to find out that I was mistaken! Both from reading theologians and personal interaction with Christians of many denominations I learned that most of Christianity is quite comfortable with evolution. And I also learned that esseially NONE of science is comfortable with creationism!

AtI also first heard of creation science while an undergraduate, but did not then see any examples of it. It was only when I went to graduate school that I saw issues of the Creation Research Society Quarterly on another graduate student's desk. When I was alone in the office I would sneak over and read articles from an issue. I remember being shocked at their uniformly low quality. I had thought that I might at least be challenbged by some of them, but I remember them to have been uniformly silly. But I was hooked on creationism. It was late in my graduate career when I first read the mini-symposium on changing speed of light and first heard of one Barry Setterfield. It was not until a year or so later, however, when I was doing a post doc at Argonne National Laboratory that I managed find Setterfield's old 1983 article with the famous .99999999+ correlation coeficient for the speed of light data. But that gets way past any possible "conversion" issues on my part.

In summary my mind was changed because an old earth made sense, but a young one didn't. Biology was irrelevant to me. I do not remember any time after about age 11 when I was convinced that creationism was true, although I am not sure that I was convinced it was false. However, while in junior high school I made it a point to learn (and believe) as much of LUtheran Orthodoxy as I could. I think an important source book was Koehler's "A Summary of Christian Doctrine", which, as were most Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod publications, was entirely YEC. So I must have held some contradictory notions, but I am not sure how I tried to resolve them.

And of course these are my memories without documentary support. I think you should be suspicious of them. It seems to me that what I remember myself thinking casts me in too "heroic" a light. I appear too rational for a child or adolescent. I suspect that there were complecations, dubts, and regressions,; but I cannot clearly remember them.