The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)

BrianCalgary

He did send him to preach.

Scofflaw

wolfsbane wrote:

Hmm. 40 years from now your arguments will be likewise. Does that make them necessarily false?

It will almost certainly make them outdated, scientifically. After all, plate tectonics theory is only about 40 years old. It's always possible that by then science will have demonstrated Creationism beyond doubt! Although, given the lack of scientific effort on the part of Creationists, I have my doubts...

wolfsbane wrote:

- the great white hope of abiogenesis. I think it has already been refuted by the article on abiogenesis.

Once more, from the top: abiogenesis has nothing to do with evolution. Also, I think you'll find that it's just one great white hope - there's a lot of contending theories.

wolfsbane wrote:

I wasn't going to comment, to spare your blushes. You asked why no mummified dinosaur remains have been found, whilst those of creatures less than 6000 years old have. You made the point that the mummies are found in the desert where many of the fossilized dinosaurs are found also.

Think about it. You cannot get both processes going on at once in the same area. Mummification must be the more recent. Mummification is rare and found in arid conditions only. Such conditions mean sparse popultions. But fossilization is extensive, covering vast areas of the world. It requires water (lots of it) and sediment - and catastrophy. The deserts where there is fossil-bearing sedimentary rock were once underwater.

So we will not find many mummies of dinosaurs - some may turn up, but it would require a sort of desert-living type to die in just the right sheltered spot and that will be rare indeed. Where there any/many desert types?

Ho ho! You funny man you! Noah lived 1050 years after Creation, so the Flood is later than the earliest mummies. These in turn are buried in tombs cut into the rock that you claim the Flood created. Were your fascinating theory correct, we would expect (1) mummies below dinosaurs, or (2) mummies in buildings covered by Flood sediments, and (3) something of a hiatus in the "mummy record" while the survivors dried out, and (4) wet mummies.

For the record, the idea of Egypt being "sparsely populated, hence few mummies" is hilarious. Have you ever been to Egypt, or indeed any of the Biblical countries? Seen the way a thin line "divides the desert from the sown"? A dinosaur that lived by the Nile (not that there are any records whatsoever of them living there, I'm afraid, despite the way the Egyptians drew pictures of everything) would have to walk about quarter of a mile from the river to be in the desert. No need for "desert-living types", any more than that's the explanation for the human mummies.

In addition, you can actually tell the difference between a bunch of bones that got swept together in a catastrophic flood (heck, even a stream will do), and the skeleton of something that died where you found it. Dinosaurs are found in deserts, on the remains of nests, that contain the remains of eggs. Tricky thing for a world-destroying flood to do.

You must mean that all dinosaurs found in the Sahara (for example) are allocthonous - that they were washed there by the Flood, and that they didn't live there, on account of it being a desert. Would that explain how they're never found mixed up with anything else (like humans, for example), do you think? Water just naturally sorts things? Go on, pull the other one, it's got bells on! Talk about breaches of the second law of thermodynamics.

more when I stop laughing for a moment,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

BrianCalgary wrote:

He did send him to preach.

They never met!

regards,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

wolfsbane wrote:

So they would not know what rocks to look for if they didn't believe them to be millions of years old

What about just knowing what sort of rocks are associated with oil? That might make it simplier. No need of speculation as to how old they might be. I know where to go for my petrol, with out having to find out when the station was first built. If I developed a theory that it was built to supply our needs in WW2, or that it was built last year to cash in on a niche market, what has that to do with knowing what the pumps look like?

And creationist geologists can't find oil???

Again, you are unintentionally hilarious. Clearly, you have no idea whatsoever what goes into finding oil these days. Every sort of rock that's associated with oil is even more strongly associated with no oil whatsoever. No, I'm afraid an awful lot of very detailed date-dependent detective work and modelling goes into it, none of which would stand up for a moment if the Creationist view had even the tiniest smidgen of truth to it. You actually have to know what did which, and when.

Creationist geologists, eh? Oh wolfsbane, you cunning fellow! The answer is that no Creationist geologist has ever found anything whatsoever using the Creationist version of geology. Some have, indeed, done perfectly respectable work, using the standard (that's 'evolutionist' to you) version of geology, with all its "dating flaws" and "impossible" timelines. But no, not one has done or found anything useful using the Creationist framework.

And oil, you know, isn't peer-reviewed. If there was some kind of conspiracy of secular geologists to promote a mendacious, materialistic, false view of geology just to spite good Christians, as you claim, the oil companies wouldn't pay their wages. Oil companies don't give a toss about materialistic a priori assumptions, the Theory of Evolution, or scientific peer pressure. They want oil, and if the Creationist version of geology produced it, they'd use it. It doesn't, because it's tripe, so they don't use it. Sorry.


take your trousers off - I can't hear you clearly,
Scofflaw

robindch

> [wolfsbane] it is better to check by comparing various translations and commentators

Or, indeed, you could do what I did and spend six years learning Ancient Greek to the extent that the NT was easy enough to read -- as I've said here before, the NT greek is very, very basic and it's not difficult to get to the point where you can read it yourself and form your own independent opinion on the text. Though reading the far deeper and more interesting Plato, and the rest of the extant greek texts which gave rise to the NT, may have the traumatic effect of making you suspect that the NT isn't exactly what its promoters say it is.

robindch

> not one has done or found anything useful using the Creationist framework.

Perhaps they fell off those flinty crags before they got the chance to tell anybody what they'd found? Or maybe they just don't bother looking coz they *know* they'll never get rich? Either way, it's easy enough to understand why creationist grology is somewhat underendowed in the achievement department.

Asiaprod

Here is an interesting oddity that appeared in todays BBC News website.

Darwinulidae family has been female and asexual for 200 million years
A shrimp-like creature may have to forfeit its claim to be the longest abstainer from sex in the animal world. The discovery of three living male specimens casts doubt on the idea that the Darwinulidae family has been female and asexual for 200 million years. Darwinulids are fresh water crustaceans with a hinged shell. They measure less than a millimetre in length. Despite their diminutive size, however, they have an excellent fossil record.

But a team of scientists, writing in a Royal Society journal, cannot say yet whether the newly found males actually perform a sexual function. If they do not, if researchers can show the males are just some evolutionary hangover that is really no longer needed for reproduction - then the creatures will retain their famed celibacy status.

And it is from studying this long history that scientists believe females have been producing young without the need for fertilisation from the Late Triassic onwards. How these "ancient asexuals" persist is a mystery. Evolutionary theory suggests they should accumulate so many damaging genetic mutations (errors) over the generations that they would die out within 0.5-1 million years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/default.stm

Morbert

wolfsbane wrote:

Morbert said:

I assume not - just like the pro-evolution talk.orgin articles.

So we can conclude that there are no peer reviewed articles which support the claim that Evolution violates the 2nd law.

And again... You say the scientific community is biased, yet I would trust the scientific community far more than the creationist community. For reasons I've said before:

Morbert wrote:

Now... Why should I take the side of the majority? Well... Science isn't about the majority. But the hours of research, the vast amount of papers publishes in peer reviewed journals, the sheer weight of informed theorising and testing of hypotheses adds up to far far more than could be performed by any list of creationist scientists you could produce. So I must therefore conclude that the work of the scientific community has the integrity and rigour needed when addressing and investigating such matters.

It would of course then be proving evolution false, and that is not going to get peer-reviewed, for all the reasons already mentioned.

So we can conclude that there are no peer-reviewed articles? (I trust the scientific community, as it is far larger and far more research has been done which supports evolution.)

And you have not provided evidence of a conspiracy against creationism.

Yes, my own experience shows me I was naturally opposed to God. You should recognise that in your heart also - but depends how honestly you examine yourself.

Tell the huge amount of honest christians who study evolution that they are 'naturally opposed' to God.

Yes, I have the testimonies of other scientists who attest the fact that they suppressed anything that opposed evolution - and when they came to reject evolution themselves, experienced that from their colleagues.


See for example: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v4/i4/religion.asp
For an interesting background:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i4/darwins_illness.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v12/i3/darwin.asp

You do realise that none of those articles support a scientific conspiracy. They just complain that nobody accepts their misapplied definition of religion. And none of them support any of their claims with evidence, they just expect us to believe them.

Again... you're asking me not to trust the scientific community, yet the amount of research and man-hours they've put in to studying evolution gives them a more informed opinion on the matter. If they reject creationist articles, it's because the articles do not build their case for creationism on scientific evidence. Your conspiracy claims are still unfounded.

You mean peer-reviewed by evolutionists. I can provide those peer-reviewed by creationists. We have gone over why unbiased peer-review is not presently open to creationists.

I mean peer-reviewed in scientific journals.

And I trust the scientific community, a community full of Christians by the way, more than I trust creationists.

---

I think we can conclude that the scientific community overwhelmingly supports evolution. So if you like we can discuss whether or not the scientific community is to be trusted. That way I can show everyone why their research is far more trustworthy and free of any 'conspiracy'.

And I haven't forgotten aboit the abiogenesis article... I'll post you what I think of it soon.

Assyrian

Hi, mind if I join in?

wolfsbane wrote:

Just to give a bit of Christian perspective on the creation/evolution debate:

It was foretold:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Peter%203:1-9;&version=50;49;47;31;

So when Peter warns about scepticism, his advice to Christians was not to take God's 'days' literally: do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (verse 8). It sounds like pretty good advice today.

robindch

Earlier today, I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's excellent In Our Time from two weeks back about Don Quixote, in which they referred to a scene from the start of the book which couldn't help but put me in mind me of creationists and their approach to evidence and testing. In the following quote, Don Quixote is the 'he':

The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion. This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.

Cervantes' full (and wonderful) text is here.

samb

Assyrian wrote:

Hi, mind if I join in?

So when Peter warns about scepticism, his advice to Christians was not to take God's 'days' literally: do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (verse 8). It sounds like pretty good advice today.

Good to see that there are some good old fashioned Old Earth Creationists around. I don't agree with your views about the 'good book' or 'our lord' but appart from that, our worlds are very similiar, welcome.

Assyrian

Thanks for the welcome. I look forward to chatting with you.

wolfsbane

Scofflaw said:

Ho ho! You funny man you! Noah lived 1050 years after Creation, so the Flood is later than the earliest mummies. These in turn are buried in tombs cut into the rock that you claim the Flood created. Were your fascinating theory correct, we would expect (1) mummies below dinosaurs, or (2) mummies in buildings covered by Flood sediments, and (3) something of a hiatus in the "mummy record" while the survivors dried out, and (4) wet mummies.

That would make sense if I agreed with the dating methods - but that is also a point of contention with creationists. We do not accept the assumptions built in to them. The mummification is later than the catastrophy that gives us most of the fossils - the Flood accounts for most of them, the mummies occuring later when the climatic conditions allowed. My point was that you cannot find mummies preceding fossils in the same place. The process that gives fossils would remove mummies. Unless you find a fossilized mummy - I haven't heard of one.

For the record, the idea of Egypt being "sparsely populated, hence few mummies" is hilarious. Have you ever been to Egypt, or indeed any of the Biblical countries? Seen the way a thin line "divides the desert from the sown"? A dinosaur that lived by the Nile (not that there are any records whatsoever of them living there, I'm afraid, despite the way the Egyptians drew pictures of everything) would have to walk about quarter of a mile from the river to be in the desert. No need for "desert-living types", any more than that's the explanation for the human mummies.

You don't acept that the Sahara was once a fertile region?

In addition, you can actually tell the difference between a bunch of bones that got swept together in a catastrophic flood (heck, even a stream will do), and the skeleton of something that died where you found it. Dinosaurs are found in deserts, on the remains of nests, that contain the remains of eggs. Tricky thing for a world-destroying flood to do.

You are saying that these fossils just died where they sat and weren't killed and buried by mud? I've never heard of anything fossilizing in the air. Can you elaborate?

You must mean that all dinosaurs found in the Sahara (for example) are allocthonous - that they were washed there by the Flood, and that they didn't live there, on account of it being a desert. Would that explain how they're never found mixed up with anything else (like humans, for example), do you think?

As I said, I think it has been well established that the Sahara was once not a desert ( I'm open to correction on that). But both scenarios would be in operation in a world-wide flood: some of the native flora and fauna would be buried in the first sediments, others would be deposited in the months following. Yes, man and his artifacts may well be found with the other fossils as the discoveries continue. That certainly would be a falsification of evolutionary theory. The argument from silence is not overwhelming until sufficient evidence is in.

wolfsbane

Scofflaw said:

Clearly, you have no idea whatsoever what goes into finding oil these days. Every sort of rock that's associated with oil is even more strongly associated with no oil whatsoever. No, I'm afraid an awful lot of very detailed date-dependent detective work and modelling goes into it, none of which would stand up for a moment if the Creationist view had even the tiniest smidgen of truth to it. You actually have to know what did which, and when.

Creationist geologists, eh? Oh wolfsbane, you cunning fellow! The answer is that no Creationist geologist has ever found anything whatsoever using the Creationist version of geology. Some have, indeed, done perfectly respectable work, using the standard (that's 'evolutionist' to you) version of geology, with all its "dating flaws" and "impossible" timelines. But no, not one has done or found anything useful using the Creationist framework.

See: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v16/i4/think.asp

wolfsbane

robindch said:

Or, indeed, you could do what I did and spend six years learning Ancient Greek to the extent that the NT was easy enough to read -- as I've said here before, the NT greek is very, very basic and it's not difficult to get to the point where you can read it yourself and form your own independent opinion on the text. Though reading the far deeper and more interesting Plato, and the rest of the extant greek texts which gave rise to the NT, may have the traumatic effect of making you suspect that the NT isn't exactly what its promoters say it is.

I'm surprised (maybe not!) that you denigrate the koine Greek that the NT is written in. It was the language of the people, and God was speaking to the masses, not just to the literary elite. Maybe you are looking for a Christianity that is not open to ignorant folks. Try Gnosticism, not real Christianity.

wolfsbane

Asiaprod said:

Here is an interesting oddity that appeared in todays BBC News website.

Careful, that might be taken as critically analyzising evolution. :eek:

See here for what might be in store for you: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/0215ohio.asp

wolfsbane

Morbert said:

So we can conclude that there are no peer-reviewed articles? (I trust the scientific community, as it is far larger and far more research has been done which supports evolution.)

And as I've said, you know the reason why creationist arguments don't get peer-reviewed by evolutionists. They do of course by creationist scientists.

Your trust in the scientific establishment should be reviewed. See following for another reason why.

And you have not provided evidence of a conspiracy against creationism.

The testimonies I have from trusted Christians who have experienced suppression in their professional lives, the Smithsonian incident, and now: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/0215ohio.asp make me sure about a conspiracy.

Tell the huge amount of honest christians who study evolution that they are 'naturally opposed' to God.

Many are not Christians in the authentic, NT sense. But those who are have either not bothered checking the facts or are too scared to do so. They have chickened-out in the face of persecution. The best of Christians can fall likewise: Peter, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=galatians%202:11-21;&version=50;; Archbishop Cranmer, http://englishhistory.net/tudor/pcranmer.html
Repentance will mark the genuine.

wolfsbane

Assyrian said:

So when Peter warns about scepticism, his advice to Christians was not to take God's 'days' literally: do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (verse 8). It sounds like pretty good advice today.

Yes, one always has to check whether a statement is meant literally or metaphorically. Did Christ mean He would be raised in three days literally or metaphorically? We see from all the other Scripture that it was literally. We need to have good reason to take something metaphorically when it seems to be literal.

How does this apply when we come to Genesis and the 6 Day Creation? If it means days of indeterminate length, then we have to fit in what happened in each day. Can that be done? Not by any evolutionary account I have heard.

Perhaps we can say it was not meant to convey any real history, just to assert that God started the universe with a big bang and has left it to develop. That would make a non-sense of all that follows in Genesis and the reality of those accounts that is appealed to in the NT. The supreme difficulty for the Christian is to account for suffering and death under the heading of 'Very Good'.

I have heard of no theory that allows evolution and the bible to co-exist. Do you have one?

wolfsbane

I watched an Horizon program ( What Really Killed the Dinosaurs? ) on Sky last night and was enlightened. Not by the debate among the evolutionists, but by the tone of it.

I thought the dismissive 'not even science' line was reserved for creationists, but it seems that is how evolutionary scientists treat each other when their pet theories are questioned. The guy defending the current consensus on what killed the dinosaurs wrote Prof.Keller's work off in the terms so familiar to creationists.

Here's a bit from the Princeton Weekly Bulletin: Dinosaur dust-up http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/03/0922/

wolfsbane

Scofflaw said:

They never met!

Read the accounts: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%209:1-19;&version=50;; http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2015:1-11%20;&version=50;

wolfsbane

robindch said:

Using creationist geology, it could only be a lucky accident, given that the bible's only excursion into petrochemical exploration is a brief Deuteronomic reference to edible oil extracts which can be had from flinty crags, of all places.

Though Proverbs 21:17 goes on to suggest it may not be worthwhile in the long run, since "whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich" which must be sad, if slightly puzzling, news to the wealthy sophisticates of Dallas, Houston and elsewhere.

Your silly analogy fails when one reads that not only oil is mentioned but honey. The miraculous provision of food and water to millions of Israelites in the wilderness is described in such terms - it is not a statement of how edible oil and honey naturally occur. What has that to do with mineral oil anyway?

The Proverbs quote on loving wine and oil again seems to have escaped your learned understanding. The general rule for wise living - that is what proverbs are about - is that those who indulge themselves in luxury are unlikely to be successful in business. It says nothing about what diligent businessmen will do when they become rich. It says nothing about the exceptions to the rule - such as the lazy-good-for-nothing who spents his dole-money on lottery tickets and becomes a multi-millionare.

Scofflaw

http://www.truechristian.com/earthflat.html

Hmm. More later - wolfsbane has provided fresh thinking material (for which I thank you)!


regards,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

wolfsbane wrote:

Scofflaw said:

Read the accounts: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%209:1-19;&version=50;; http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2015:1-11%20;&version=50;

Are we using different meanings for "met"? I think we are. I meant physically, while you are happy to accept Paul's "spiritual meeting" with Christ, for which, I think, we only have Paul's word, not Christ's. I don't accept Paul's word, you do. Are you a Pauline?

regards,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

wolfsbane wrote:

Your silly analogy fails when one reads that not only oil is mentioned but honey. The miraculous provision of food and water to millions of Israelites in the wilderness is described in such terms - it is not a statement of how edible oil and honey naturally occur. What has that to do with mineral oil anyway?

The Proverbs quote on loving wine and oil again seems to have escaped your learned understanding. The general rule for wise living - that is what proverbs are about - is that those who indulge themselves in luxury are unlikely to be successful in business. It says nothing about what diligent businessmen will do when they become rich. It says nothing about the exceptions to the rule - such as the lazy-good-for-nothing who spents his dole-money on lottery tickets and becomes a multi-millionare.

I think the "flinty crags" statement relates to eagles, in any case. I presume the meaning intended indicates wild olives, which do indeed grow on flinty crags.

The other one is certainly true. However, I think robin may have intended his comments as a "joke", as we unbelievers say.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

wolfsbane wrote:

That would make sense if I agreed with the dating methods - but that is also a point of contention with creationists. We do not accept the assumptions built in to them. The mummification is later than the catastrophy that gives us most of the fossils - the Flood accounts for most of them, the mummies occuring later when the climatic conditions allowed. My point was that you cannot find mummies preceding fossils in the same place. The process that gives fossils would remove mummies. Unless you find a fossilized mummy - I haven't heard of one.

The reason I brought this up is that mummies are independently dated by radiocarbon techniques, tree-rings, and historical records. As I say, that gives the earliest mummies a date before the flood, which as you say, can't be the case!

You might also want to read this summary of fossilisation methods. Note that dinosaur skin impressions have been found - the dinosaurs in question were mummified, then fossilised.

wolfsbane wrote:

You don't acept that the Sahara was once a fertile region?

Sure. The Garamantes appear to have flourished in just such conditions, which appear to have been tailing off around the time of the Roman Empire. However, it's only bits of the Sahara (which is vast - the Garamantes were in Southern Libya, for example), and not those bits around the Nile, which has pretty much always been a long strip of vegetation in a desert.

wolfsbane wrote:

You are saying that these fossils just died where they sat and weren't killed and buried by mud? I've never heard of anything fossilizing in the air. Can you elaborate?

As you say, they don't fossilise in air, but they need not have been "killed and buried by mud". Died where they sat (or killed, although that usually means eaten), and were buried by mud (or whatever, although mud is a good preserver, in that it is fine-grained and occurs in low-energy environments). In the case of fossilised mummified dinosaurs, died and were mummified in air, then covered in wind-blown sand.


QUOTE=wolfsbane]As I said, I think it has been well established that the Sahara was once not a desert ( I'm open to correction on that). But both scenarios would be in operation in a world-wide flood: some of the native flora and fauna would be buried in the first sediments, others would be deposited in the months following. Yes, man and his artifacts may well be found with the other fossils as the discoveries continue. That certainly would be a falsification of evolutionary theory. The argument from silence is not overwhelming until sufficient evidence is in.[/QUOTE]

You're aware that we have literally hundreds of thousands of examples of fossils, fossil assemblages, fossil beds, death layers, detritus layers, etc? Not one of them contains "man and his artifacts...found with the other fossils", not one single one. For most of us I think this constitutes "sufficient evidence" - in that statistically, we're at well over 99.9% confidence.

You've already said, of course, that no evidence or lack of it would change your mind - only a theological upset (back about three or four pages, I think). In that case you should be honest in your post and say "no amount of evidence will make me change my mind".

Scofflaw

Scofflaw

Re: oil exploration. Allow me to quote from the article you cited:

Another possible application comes to mind, that of oil exploration. Palaeontologists sometimes study microfossils in down-hole cuttings or cores to correlate beds or discern the direction to the ancient shoreline. These data are couched in evolutionary, old-earth language. But is that necessary?

Not at all. Oil exploration consists primarily of the search for a particular underground geometry where oil might be trapped in the rocks. 'Oil is where you find it', as they say. The age of the rocks or the source of the oil is not of importance.

Without doubt, beds can be correlated by studying microfossils, but this has nothing to do with age or evolutionary ideas. Certain spatial patterns have been noted, but they fit just as well, if not better, into a catastrophic Flood framework as they do into a uniformitarian (evolutionary) concept.

When I was finishing my Ph.D. work, having developed a real love for petroleum exploration, I approached the research branch of a major oil company with a proposal. Pointing out that an exploration program based on old-earth/uniformitarian concepts doesn't work very well (only about one exploration well in 50 produces enough oil to pay for itself), I proposed that this company establish a team of young-earth creationist/catastrophists to see if a better exploration program could be developed.

To fund a research team of five or so creationist geologists for several years would cost about the same as one dry hole. Certainly we couldn't do any worse.

Unfortunately, my proposal was not accepted (maybe this was good, for I took a university faculty position and eventually ended up at ICR). I still don't know for sure if a Flood-geology approach would work better, but I think it could. At least it wouldn't be based on a wrong premise.

Despite the cheapness of the proposal, and the sincerity of its proposer, the oil company turned him down. Now why was that, do you think? Surely they'd be keen to use an exploration technique that other companies were not using, particularly at such a low cost!

But even oil companies, who have plenty of money to waste on staff fripperies and dry wells, wouldn't be bothered paying a team of "practical theologians" (sorry, "Creationist scientists") to waste five years of their time and the company's. There's no value proposition there. You may, if you like, pretend that the oil company's refusal to fund the proposal can be explained as foolishness, conspiracy, or wilful blindness on their part, given the clear superiority of Creationism over evolutionism, but it's rubbish, and you know it. So-called "Flood Geology" is a mish-mash of lunacy and theology, not a practical framework for finding oil, and the oil companies have no reason to pretend otherwise.

The oil industry was, and is (along with mining companies) the major driving force in the development of modern geology, which is, as you know, "evolutionist", not Creationist. Geology is "evolutionist" because that's what works - it's what gets the oil out of the ground. Creationism doesn't work. It doesn't get oil out of the ground. Here everyone can see Creationism publicly failing a major practical test, one motivated not by scientific peer pressure or atheistic conspiracy, but by a practical need for something to work. Explain that one away.

Creationism doesn't work. It doesn't get oil out of the ground.

regards,
Scofflaw

Assyrian

wolfsbane wrote:

Yes, one always has to check whether a statement is meant literally or metaphorically. Did Christ mean He would be raised in three days literally or metaphorically? We see from all the other Scripture that it was literally. We need to have good reason to take something metaphorically when it seems to be literal.

How does this apply when we come to Genesis and the 6 Day Creation? If it means days of indeterminate length, then we have to fit in what happened in each day. Can that be done? Not by any evolutionary account I have heard.

Perhaps we can say it was not meant to convey any real history, just to assert that God started the universe with a big bang and has left it to develop. That would make a non-sense of all that follows in Genesis and the reality of those accounts that is appealed to in the NT. The supreme difficulty for the Christian is to account for suffering and death under the heading of 'Very Good'.

I have heard of no theory that allows evolution and the bible to co-exist. Do you have one?

I see no problem in God using natural processes to carry out his will. So we see in Genesis 1:24 God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds..." Science tells us that the processes on the earth produced the different kinds of living creatures. I don't see the problem. Science its just telling us that what God commanded to happen, actually happened.

But what we have in Genesis is a very simplified account (where are the mushrooms?) given in poetic form, whose point is that God created everything we see. Genesis doesn't tell us if the days are metaphorical or not, though it uses the word day in about four different ways in the first two chapters. It doesn't tell us if the days are consecutive or simply come at the end of long periods of creation. It doesn't tell us is these periods are consecutive or overlap. Has the earth stopped producing green herbs and trees? Do the sun moon and stars still mark out seasons? Are living creatures still being fruitful and multiplying? In Genesis the days provide the chorus in the hymn of God creation. Reading that as a strict six day timetable may be a mistake. What is fascinating is that the poem fits our geological timetable so well.

But Genesis doesn't say the world was created in six days. There are only two place in the whole bible that suggest that. Both are in Exodus (20:11 and 31:17), but remember this is a book we are told was written by Moses, who is the one who tells us in Psalm 90 that God's days are not the same as ours. This is the passage Peter was quoting in his epistle. Psalm 90:4 For a thousand years in Your eyes are as a day, yesterday, when it passes, and as a watch in the night.

If we look at those two passages in Exodus, is the bible trying to teach us the timetable for creation? No, the whole point of the passage is teaching the Israelites to keep the Sabbath. The six days of creation are simply used as an illustration. Certainly, while the rest of the bible picks up on the lesson about keeping the Sabbath, nowhere does anyone else comment on the six day creation. God the creator is a constant theme in both the Old Testament and the New, but even when epistles were being written to Gentiles, no one picked up on six day creationism.

So we have to ask, in those two verses that mention God creation the world in six day, is it being used literally or metaphorically? As you say 'one always has to check whether a statement is meant literally or metaphorically'. Well the two verses certainly seem highly anthropomorphic, telling us God 'rested on the seventh day' or 'rested and was refreshed' as though God himself were a tired labourer weary after six days toil. That certainly sound like a metaphor to me.

The only two verses in the whole bible that mention a six day creation are in the middle of a highly anthropomorphic metaphor, and this is in a book written by someone who tells us not to take God's days literally.

I don't see a contradiction between God creating a world that involved death and predation and it being described as very good. The ecosystems in the world around us are really wonderful, and they all involve creatures with life cycles who are born and die, plants. But the bible has no problem with animals dying. God commanded a sacrificial system that involved countless thousands of animal dying, and while it was not perfect, it was certainly very good. The bible also describe God providing prey for ravens and young lions. There is no suggestion that God was not very good to do so. Does the bible actually tell us that animal death was the result of the fall?

Assyrian

Scofflaw

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cordially,
Scofflaw

Asiaprod

Scofflaw wrote:

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cordially,
Scofflaw

Charming

Son Goku

Charming

Wooooo!!, somebody has a crush.