I got this astute blog comment from Frank Morris:
“I was so impressed by your debate with Stephen Meyer that I finally bought your Evolution 2.0 book. I can’t wait to read it to see how it compares with my own journey getting kicked around by hostile Darwinians on blogs as I continued to question their seemingly crazy theory.
“Stephen Meyer, on the other hand, was profoundly disappointing. I rejected ID over 10 years ago, but I always thought that, in principle, the concept of ID accepted any form of intelligent cause, not just the God answer. The reality of cellular intelligence has forced the Discovery Institute to expose their bluff. Dr. Meyer seems to be trying to change it from ID to OD, a step up to Omniscient Design.
“He’s wrong. Omniscient means all-knowing. Cells, who are clearly rearranging their own genomes, are very intelligent, but not omniscient.
“Cells are not gods, as another responder suggested. They are intelligent little critters trying their best to survive, but they don’t simply know all things by omniscience. They use internal homeostatic systems, environmental monitoring systems and intercellular communication to establish their needs and responses to need. So they need to SEEK information about their external and internal status, which means they don’t just magically know all things. On top of that is the lack of the perfection one would expect of omniscience. Thanks for the article.”
I replied back to Frank:
Bingo, Frank, you hit it right on the head. YES YES YES YES.
You would think that “intelligent design” simply should have meant that the same principles employed in engineering, music, architecture etc. are also at work in living systems, so therefore life cannot be understood in purely reductionist terms. One would have thought that the ID crowd simply wanted the world to embrace an holistic understanding of nature. And that they would be happy for us to have done that.
The Discovery Institute people are NOT happy with my view of biology, where the intelligence resides in the cells. They consider that heresy.
What this debate shows is that Intelligent Design a la Discovery Institute is actually Old Earth Creationism. Also, my debates with Stephen Meyer have also made it clear to me that a large number of Discovery Institute supporters are actually Young Earth Creationists.
You are right on the money sir. This is why ID as it currently defines itself will never become accepted by the majority of scientists. A scientist must discover natural processes using the scientific method. That is his job. Otherwise, no paycheck.
One time I said to one of the Discovery Institute employees: “James Shapiro at the University of Chicago has a decent fighting chance of getting his view of evolution accepted by the academy, because his approach is entirely compatible with the scientific method. But your version will never be accepted by mainstream science. Ever.”
In November the Royal Society Meeting showed that Shapiro, Noble, Jablonka and the other Third Way scientists are making admirable headway in getting their program accepted by the mainstream.
But at the end of the day the Discovery Institute, instead of healing the war between science and religion, is actually perpetuating it.
Yes, Frank, your understanding of cells is very much the same as mine.
Thanks for buying Evolution 2.0, I believe you will enjoy it. Welcome to the blog and don’t be a stranger.
Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
Mike,
Suppose I responded by saying, “The universe is about 7,200 years old. It is not 14 billion years old. One cannot have an intelligent discussion with someone who thinks the universe is 14 billion years old.” This would take our discussion down to the level of a kindergarten sand box, would it not? Let’s not kid ourselves. You found your COBE argument so convincing that it changed your mind. Why should you be afraid to present it to me, just in case I might find it equally persuasive? Be brave. If you dare.
By the way, if my comment to Perry earlier this morning gets past moderation, please also consider the links I gave him at the bottom of it. I think you may find them interesting too. Maybe you would rather discuss them anyway.
Tom, read COBE for yourself. Yes, this is not kindergarten. Look it up. It is well sourced on the net.
Mike,
I already did the reading, and I even showed you the articles I found. The COBE satellite carried three instruments: DMR for mapping anisotropies in cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), FIRAS for measuring the spectrum of the CMB, and the DIRBE telescope for mapping dust emission. As far as I can tell, no age estimate was based directly on any of the COBE data collected.
If you really don’t have a COBE argument after all, or are ashamed to present it, or don’t understand it yourself, or it is just too much trouble to present it in your own words, that’s okay. Forget it. It was evidently good enough to motivate you to reject biblical chronology and go with a modern, tentative age estimate instead, but maybe you doubt that it is cogent enough to sway me the same way. If so, that’s okay too. We can move on to something else.
How about these articles as a substitute direction for our discussion?
https://creation.com/what-all-atheists-have-to-believe
https://creation.com/summer-in-the-enemys-camp
Here are links for video clips that cover the same articles but with some additional comments. You can rest your eyes while you listen.
https://creation.com/media-center?fileID=da1prVMK124
https://creation.com/media-center?fileID=stpdTVh0_z8
Tom’s premise is “physical evidence is bound to be misleading if it is the result of a miracle”.
Tom considers that God’s work of creation is a miracle. By miracle Tom believes that God’s creative activity falls outside the realm of space-time. And therefore it is impossible to observe and quantify.
Tom’s miracle view is that God created the earth with all of it’s virtual sedimentary and erosion layers that lie under the earth’s surface. It was all created under 50 hours or couple earth rotations.
And since the Niahuc Flood was a miracle it too is outside the realm of science thereby negating Mr A’s analysis.
Tom’s view is that anything presumably older than 7200 years is not worth studying because it all was created outside the realm of our space-time. It can not be studied. Our present day laws of physics do not apply to the 7200 year and older era, too.
Why is Tom even talking to this audience??? All the talk about origins here in Tom’s view us in the realm of miraculous and therefore can not be studied.
My heart goes out to the YEC movement. They are completely shut out from any investigative thinking.
Addendum:
Tom writes “…tell me the page numbers in your book where you explain how Genesis can be reinterpreted to harmonize with what atheists say about the origin of the universe, life on earth.,.”
Bad premise… who says we have to harmonize with the atheists??? Tom thinks this debate is black and white. Either you believe the atheist worldview or the YEC world view. No in between ground… Thus is the quandary the YEC movement has fallen into. They will not consider any alternatives. Perry has put forward an alternative world view. I have hinted about an even different world view but have not elaborated because it would not fly under Tom’s black and white viewpoint. In this thread it would be a waste of time.
Others in the YEC movement may be reading these posts. I am writing with them in mind.
Perry,
Thanks for inviting me to clarify and for mentioning some things that I really do need to clarify.
I thought we were discussing Grand Canyon issues and in particular, my review of the book you had me read. I think it was Mike who steered me into a discussion of virtual history instead. My book review says absolutely nothing about it.
I am here to advocate for belief in the story of our origins as recorded in Genesis, not an alternative history tentatively proposed in modern times by people who were not present when God did his work of creation. They rely entirely on their interpretation of currently available evidence. You may reject the no-miracle presupposition, but scientists who write history do not. They are committed to methodological materialism and do not dare allow “a Divine Foot in the door.” If their story happens to be at odds with Genesis, then I call their substitute “virtual history” and stick with Genesis as my higher authority.
I know that you believe that you can somehow harmonize Genesis as necessary, but frankly, I don’t see how. If your book covers the items of interest that I listed earlier, please tell me the page numbers.
We both operate under a “no fake history” presupposition. Fake histories may be entertaining, but we base our worldview on what we believe is real history. We have Genesis and modern alternatives that appear to me to be quite irreconcilable. Which ones are fake, and which one, if any, is real? That is the big question before us.
You said, “God doesn’t make appearances of exquisitely detailed history that never actually happened.” I think this reflects a key misunderstanding. God doesn’t make appearances of history at all, detailed or otherwise. Genesis 1 and 2 are not appearances of history. Those chapters *are* history as told in words that people can understand. When God performs a miracle, such as making Eve from a part of Adam, physical evidence is left behind, so I suppose in a sense, one might say that he made an appearance, something that appears to people in the present, but this is not an appearance of (past) history either. History is quite abstract or inscrutable until God reveals it, a witness remembers it, or someone has studied and interpreted some selected evidence and then proposed a speculative history, which would be man’s doing, not God’s. If a proposed history is wrong, it is the fault of the human historian, not God.
I think it would help you think this through if you considered the miracle reported in John 6:1-13. If the leftover food were studied by relevant experts who refused to consider eyewitness testimony, since people can be fooled, what history would they propose in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Would they report that the food had a miraculous origin? If their story was all about purely natural sources of the food and natural means of delivery (what may be called virtual history), but you had witnessed the miracle yourself or trusted the testimony of someone else who did, which story would you believe? Which one would you consider fake?
You challenged me with “the REAL HISTORY of scars” but did not mention any other aspect of our Lord’s appearance that could also have been used by people to develop a speculative history. I do not know of any miracle that erased history, in the sense of a story written to explain evidence, but let’s think about this case in particular. The scars would lead Thomas and other observers to propose a history that involved Jesus being wounded in the past, but then the wounds healed, leaving scars or some kind of mark, and evidently, an earlier flow of blood was stopped at some point in the story. How long should this healing process have taken? This detail ought to be in the proposed history too, right?
So far, we have covered what we know from John 20:19-29, but what about Luke 24:13-35? In spite of his recent torture and crucifixion, Jesus was evidently already healed well enough to make a long walk without any sign of serious difficulty. What history would Cleopas propose based on the evidence he saw? Would it be real history, fake, or virtual?
Think about an ordinary person who goes outdoors at night and admires the stars. They are beautiful, right? And we believe they declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1). They can be considered an appearance God made, all right, but what about history? I seriously doubt that any history will come to mind in this scenario. One is just awed by the spectacle without bothering to imagine a history based on it. An astronomer might propose a history after pointing to the Andromeda galaxy, which is said to be 2.5 million light years from earth, and the history might stretch back billions of years to a Big Bang event in the beginning, but this hardly counts as a history straight from God, especially if the astronomer conveniently ignored any evidence suggesting less extreme ages.
I am finally down to your last paragraph. God certainly does not fake history. He reveals true history in the Bible. A history proposed by a man is only a story based on current appearances, interpretations, presuppositions, and often the testimony of witnesses deemed credible. It could be a correct history, all right, but if the selected physical evidence was the result of a miracle, I think a secular history will necessarily mislead, because no miracle is allowed.
We should never equate data with history. No geological or astronomical data can be history, either real or virtual, either in whole or in part. Someone can study data in the process of tentatively proposing a history, but the end product could be real, fake, or virtual, depending on whether the reported events actually did happen or not.
I think our relevant premises ought to be 100% compatible, but if you suspect they are not, please explain. I don’t think I have said anything here that ought to be controversial among Bible-believing Christians.
Tom,
You said:
I will never be able to come to agreement with you on this. Ever.
Let me remind you that as soon as you say this, you remove Christianity from all external data that generally tend to verify it. The incredibly precise historical detail that Luke provides in Acts and Luke for example, historical figures like David or Isaiah or Daniel or Paul; archaeological evidence for all kinds of events in the Bible – all the historically verifiable things that put Christianity head and shoulders above all the other world religions – all go out the window.
And by the same token, let me remind you that YECs should also stop trying to advocate their own version of science. I’m not even sure what the point is of the guy who says the earth is 7200 years old, all his models and reconstructions of history, if scientific data tells us nothing. Or if events recorded in geological and astronomical events may have never actually happened at all.
You have an extremely rigid view of Genesis and you think that interpretation is the final word. That is your choice. You make no effort to assemble a wider view of history from geology, anthropology, archaeology, cosmology, genetics, biology, physics, astronomy or a dozen other disciplines. You seem to equate these with atheism.
I thought this issue through very thoroughly 30 years ago. The pastor of my church decreed that we were only going to use the Bible, and not psychology or anything else, to try to solve peoples’ problems.
This sounded very purist and Biblical and white-glove until I realized that even the Biblical authors referred to knowledge and history outside the Bible. And that this pastor had a local radio program made possible by technology.
His radio waves traveled at the speed of light. Just like light from stars 100 million light years away. As far as we can tell, that light left those stars 100 million years ago.
The church I grew up in split over psychology. This church had doctrines roughly similar to yours.
And if I followed suit, all I would do was build a narrow isolating legalistic silo around myself.
What I realized was that the real challenge is to integrate as many kinds of truth as we can investigate. I realized that the process would ALWAYS be messy, but if I did this I would learn far more about both the Bible AND the world around me.
The learning runs in both directions. “Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” A line from a Bob Bennett song which remains one of the guiding ideas of my life.
So I have spent my life trying to do that. I’ll never get it perfect, but I’ve found this approach opens up an amazing world. The discoveries are endless.
You have chosen a different path. You are not engaging with facts or data at all. You are not permitted to, because of the bolded statement above. And that is your choice. You have chosen to believe that science has nothing to say to us about history.
So it is at this point where we have to part company.
Thank you for helping us get to the bedrock issue of our disagreement. It is now very clear. Which is what this forum is all about.
Your statement above in bold says it all. And it signals that no more useful dialogue between us will be possible.
I wish you the best in your journey.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: The very same pastor who decreed that we were only going to use the Bible, and not psychology, demoted and publicly shamed my dad when he took my mom to a psychiatrist.
She had a chemical imbalance and bipolar disorder. The psychiatrist correctly diagnosed her, and the medication he prescribed immediately corrected the problem.
Dad was a pastor and elder. He was taken before the board of elders and reprimanded and removed from his position as elder. His job description was changed because he “did not have control of his family and did not meet the qualifications of a pastor / teacher.”
Then my mother’s “sin” and “rebellion” was announced on a Sunday morning to a congregation of 2,000 people.
She never quite recovered from the trauma of public shaming. She lived in fear of that guy for the rest of her life. She died a year and a half ago, age 73.
The whole story is told here:
http://www.coffeehousetheology.com/anne-rice-leaves-the-church/comment-page-4/
I would think most people should be aghast to hear this story. They should be. But it’s really not any more tragic than teaching kids that the earth is 6,000 years old and telling them that science can tell us nothing of the earth’s history.
In both cases, you’re blasting holes in the credibility of Christianity with a sawed-off shotgun. And losing your best minds at a critical age. When in fact this war between science and religion is so bloody ridiculous and unnecessary.
There is no conflict between science and Christianity, or the Bible. Because Genesis was not meant to answer most of the questions we’re arguing about here, any more than the epistles of Paul can diagnose bipolar disorder. Scripture serves a much higher purpose than that. People stretching back to Augustine and Tertullian and Origen have been saying this for over 1000 years.
The conflict is created by the legalists and dogmatists – the Ken Hams and the Richard Dawkins of the world, who make lots of money and acquire millions of devotees by perpetuating an unnecessary fabricated war.
PPS and no don’t say “Oh Perry I’m so sorry, but I think you had this traumatic experience so you don’t believe the Bible anymore.”
Wrong. I had this traumatic experience and then rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or walking out on my fellow Christians (like Anne Rice did) I decided to integrate the concrete and the spiritual.
I hope this website is a safe place where people who have had such experiences can re-think the issues and have some time and space to heal. And still marvel at the wonder of this amazing world.
Perry,
Have we really identified “the bedrock issue of our disagreement”? You opened with a long quote from my comment and strongly asserted that you disagree with it, but I can’t believe that you disagree with it lock, stock, and barrel. In particular, you surely do not disagree with this part of it: “Someone can study data in the process of tentatively proposing a history, but the end product could be real, …” So what exactly is the part of it that bothers you or seems controversial? I can only guess.
Let’s think about geological data. Suppose the data of interest are measurements of radioactivity in some isotopes in a rock found in a geologic stratum. We now have data, but do we have a history? Do we even have the age of the rock sample? No and no. We won’t have an age until some human being has processed the raw data (the measurements), applied a reasoning process that involves presuppositions, and proposed an age based on the data, certain ideas, and the result of calculations. We still don’t have a history, just an estimated age of a single rock. We have to wait for someone to develop a narrative by integrating this proposed age with other conclusions, all developed through the same kind of process, before we can finally say that we have a history. Once this is done, even the history (“the end product”) is still tentative, because more information may come to light later that requires a revision. This is why I say we should never equate data with history. Data alone can verify nothing. If you disagree with my analysis of this, please explain where I went wrong.
You may be thinking that data or appearances in physical evidence, at least after careful human processing, ought to lead to a history as valid and relevant as anything we find in Genesis, certainly not tentative at all. If so, I hope that this article will disabuse you of this misconception.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/oldest-life-earth-iron-fossils-canada-vents-science/
A history of our origins ought to tell us when life first appeared on earth, right? This article says that “3.7-billion-year-old microbial mats found in Greenland” were once considered “the oldest known traces of life,” but focus on that key word “known,” an admission that older traces of life might exist but were not yet known at the time, because they had not yet been discovered. Of course, we should suspect that the first life on earth left no trace at all that can even possibly be both discovered and dated with confidence.
In your view, is God telling us through appearances that life began on earth 3.7 billion years ago or half a billion years earlier? If you traveled back in time to the 1800’s, scientists wearing their historian hat might have told you that both estimates are highly exaggerated. Has God been changing his mind, as though he had no idea what the correct figure is? Perish the thought! He was there. The figure keeps changing because the histories proposed by people keep changing, partly because of the different data being analyzed and taken into account. It’s just the way this process works. If this is the only kind of history you trust, you really have no way to know anything for sure. Expect constant revision as more is learned. Those of us who go with Genesis do not have this problem. What God told us is indeed “extremely rigid.” If any testimony is not extremely rigid, it is probably because the witness is lying and can’t keep his story straight.
The quotation you selected also mentioned astronomical data, but it is essentially the same story. You look up and admire a star, and this gives you data but no age or history. We agree that the light we see took time to get to us, even a significant amount of time, so this much is different from a case where our data comes from a rock. However, the light that can be measured is just the light at this (incoming) end of its journey. We have no access to data derived from the other (outgoing) end. In the case of a single object, we may have data from a couple of hundred years ago, or in the case of a supernova, it might be a thousand years, but certainly no more than 7,200 years. The bottom line is that God told us that he made the stars also during the week of creation (“in the beginning”). We are on our own if we want more detail than this based on the kind of tentative history that I described above.
You said that I “remove Christianity from all external data that generally tend to verify it,” but I certainly do not, even if we agree that you really did not mean “external data” here but rather something more like tentative secular history. Of course, I have no power to remove Christianity from anything, but we can probably agree that you really meant to accuse me of denying that truth claims in the Bible might be verified at least partly by means of comparisons with reconcilable secular history.
Even with those clarifications, no way! As you should realize, I am impressed with the work of Gerald E. Aardsma, who has done amazing work in this area, not to mention Edwin R. Thiele, who worked before him on a credible chronology of the kings of Judah and Israel. Notice the books in the top banner on Aardsma’s website:
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/
The fourth book in his series may be the most amazing one of all, since Aardsma claims in it that the genealogical information provided in Genesis led him to discover an anti-aging vitamin with practical benefits in the here and now. Does any tentative history based on a modern study of physical evidence have anything like this to justify confidence in its accuracy? The work of people like Thiele and Aardsma certainly does not go out the window! This is true even if we have to admit that “scientific data tells us nothing” directly without fallible interpretation and write-up by a human being.
You said, “… YECs should also stop trying to advocate their own version of science,” but you were not clear about what version you have in mind. If we are talking about a study of nature and the laws of nature as currently observed and investigated through hypotheses, repeatable experiments, and well-known scientific methods, then we are all in agreement and have no problem with any of this. It is completely uncontroversial. I do not equate any of the disciplines you listed with atheism, as long as this is the kind of science we mean.
What some of us may find controversial is the idea that another mission of science is to investigate the past, even our origins, through speculation, based on a study of physical evidence currently available, with a firm commitment to methodological materialism (the no-miracle presupposition). Not even this is controversial, as far as I am concerned, if the goal is to enrich, not replace, a history in the Bible based on testimony. If by science you mean *replacing the history of our origin as presented in the Bible*, then this evidently can be quite attractive to atheists. Have you seen this video? It’s only about ten minutes long. You can skip to 0:30 without missing anything important, and then you get to the meat of it by 3:55.
https://creation.com/media-center?fileID=stpdTVh0_z8
Writing a history is normally the work of historians, and the “scientific” approach is seldom useful to them. The best histories are based almost entirely on the testimony of witnesses deemed credible, which is what we have in Genesis. Can you imagine this? Suppose a history of the Revolutionary War is written by scientists who rejected all written documents and eyewitness accounts on the theory that they could be faked and should all be considered unreliable, so they based their history on scientific archaeological studies entirely. Would you trust this history to be both true and interesting? Would this approach demand more or less credence if the history were about our origins?
Thanks for sharing traumatic experiences from your past. I deem them quite credible. My doctrines certainly are not similar to the ones regarding psychology that you described. Where did you get that idea? I was reminded of a time when I was on a pastor search committee. A candidate had a bachelor’s degree in psychology. I and one other committee member liked him and wanted to call him. He was rejected by the committee as a whole, evidently at least partly because of that degree. This was a church where someone saw to it that none of Dr. James Dobson’s books were allowed in our church library because of his training in psychology. My wife and I like his books and do not approve of censoring them.
We have since left that church, and I have not seen any disapproval of Dr. Dobson or psychology at our new church, but on the other hand, it has no library. I don’t recall any mention of psychology. In your scenario, I certainly would have been on the side of you and your parents. Please do not rush to judgment. Also, please note that this was an issue related to real science, not history. It therefore seems quite irrelevant to the virtual history issue that we have been discussing.
In your P. S., you wrote, “There is no conflict between science and Christianity, or the Bible.” I agree entirely, provided you really mean *science* and not history written by atheists or scientists committed to methodological materialism. You went on to say, “Genesis was not meant to answer most of the questions we’re arguing about here, any more than the epistles of Paul can diagnose bipolar disorder.” You did not specify exactly which questions you had in mind, but if ways to diagnose bipolar disorder should be a typical example, we agree. Genesis was not meant to detail the laws of nature, which is the proper mission of scientists who study things like bipolar disorder and the world as we observe it in our time.
But let’s not get confused. Genesis was clearly meant to provide a true and accurate history of our origin, which establishes God as our rightful Lord, and the story of the first sin and the curses that followed, which ultimately explains why we need to be saved from our own sin (Rom. 5:12-19). I have not seen any secular replacement for Genesis that makes sense in light of the key Christian doctrine of salvation (soteriology). What purpose could possibly be higher than this? If you reject the *history* found in Genesis, I think you deprive yourself of any consistent rationale for honestly accepting the major truth claims of Christianity. If you disagree, please explain.
On your PPS, I applaud your decision “to integrate the concrete and the spiritual.” I think I do this too. I see no conflict at all. Do you believe the Bible? In particular, do you believe the story in Gen. 2:20-24? Or do you believe that every human being in real history had biological grandparents? Do you believe that the story in Gen. 3 is literally true? Or does the talking snake put it into the category of fairy tales, perhaps with some unspecified lesson in morality? As I see it, that first temptation not to trust what God has plainly said is one that we all still face, and we ought not to fall for it. Ever.
Start with the speed of light. Once you’ve squarely and honestly dealt with that, we can go from there.
Nonsense! Cite all the YEC literature you like. Nonsense! Let’s focus on the 7200 year old earth. Tom, this is your date for creation of the universe and of course the earth. 7200 years. At this point nothing else matters. Your date is right or wrong. Do not tell us it could be 7300 or 7100. 10,000 years is in the same YEC ballpark. 20,000 is in the same ballpark. It doesn’t matter. Pick your number. We’ll assume it’s 7200 because you keep mentioning it…
Now let’s look at the layers. We can make some intelligent guesses about time with these layers. At your North Rim there was no Flood with 1106 feet below the Rim. So those layers near the top were deposited at some other time BEFORE the Flood.
Water action will deposit a layer. It needs to dry out before the next layer lays on top. If it is wet, the layers will mix and become 1 thicker layer. In a single layer the heavier particles will sink. Like in tree rings there are thicker and thinner regions in a layer. THUS IS WHY WE CAN SEE THE LAYERS. Like we can see easily tree rings. (BS Biology, UW. I know this tree ring stuff!)
How long does it take for 1 layer of sediment to dry out? Multiple that by the zillion layers in the Grand Canton… Some layers were deposited by wind action. Same thing. Do the math. I don’t care how you cut it. 7200 years is not an iota amount of time to complete the process of sedimentation. These sediments run thousands of feet deep all through the SW and in the SE. It’s the rule… It is nonsense to think they were laid down in 24 hours… I would consider the 24 hour window if the layering was perfect. Like a baker layering a cake. It’s nice and even. The earth’s layering is absolute chaos! Layers are uplifted. At time they are even flipped over. There is all kinds of trash embedded in the layers LIKE FOSSILS! Billions of fossils! Embedded all throughout the layers. God embedded them in the layers in 24 hours as a work of art??? Come on!!! Sheer nonsense!!! Your whole worldview comes crashing doen on this 7200 year nonsense. The Biblical day is not a hard 24 hour day. It’s up for interpretation. Ask a Hebrew scholar. It can be an eon. Looks to me like it’s an eon.
Perry,
I can’t say I blame you, given the number of irons you have in the fire, just right here on this one thread of your blog, but you have lost your place in our discussion of the speed of light. I think the ball is actually in your court on this issue. As a refresher, this is from my July 22, 2017, at 9:36 pm, comment addressed to you (next paragraph only):
“Your comment also included yet another reference to a separate topic that I remember addressing long ago. You wrote, ‘Speed of light, Tom. You only need to know that one thing and you know the earth is old. Period.’ Maybe you just forgot that we agreed that the edge of the observable universe is supposed to be much too far away for light to move from there to earth in the alleged age of the universe. We also agreed that this is not a problem once we take into account a natural expansion of space. No miracle is required. I asked whether we have any good reason to rule out the possibility that God miraculously expanded space or ‘stretched out the heavens’ (Is. 44:[24]; 45:12) during the week of creation. Did you ever answer this? If the right answer is that we have no good reason to rule it out, except perhaps because of a firm commitment to the no-miracle presupposition, then I think your claim about the speed of light falls apart.”
On December 19, 2017, at 5:57 am, I gave you a quick recap from memory (next paragraph only):
“As I see it, the creation events were clearly miracles. Do you still disagree? If so, please explain. If you ever get around to it, please also explain why your speed of light issue cannot be resolved by saying that God stretched out the heavens (Is. 51:13,16) miraculously in the beginning. Even atheist or agnostic scientists are convinced that the edge of the observable universe is much too far away for its light to reach us during the alleged time it has existed, considering the observed speed of light, unless we take into account the theoretically natural expansion of space.”
Here are two articles for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
https://www.space.com/24073-how-big-is-the-universe.html
Those articles describe the situation differently, and reality could be some other alternative, but either way, I think my point stands, and I say it is now up to you to explain why speed of light has to be a problem for someone who believes that the entire universe was created by a miraculous act of God and is actually no older than about 7,200 years. Remember, no believer is under any obligation to explain *how* God performed a miracle through purely natural processes. If you disagree, please explain.
If my resolution satisfies you, so that you are now willing to give up your speed of light argument, you may be ready to move on to take up the challenge of the faint young sun paradox.
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/sun/the-young-faint-sun-paradox-and-the-age-of-the-solar-system/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox
By the way, you have made it obvious that you are eager to bring our discussion to a conclusion, and I am not complaining about this, but I think it would be help pick up the pace if you would simply acknowledge points where we reached agreement and explain clearly why disagreement remains. Otherwise, we may repeat or rephrase arguments unnecessarily. I wrote you a long comment earlier today, but you just left me wondering how much of my position you still consider controversial and why. Take your time though, and enjoy your Christmas. Best regards.
Tom,
I am fine with 0.01% of history ( = multiplying loaves and fishes and water to wine) creating something that looks like virtual history. I can deal with 0.01% ambiguity, no problem.
I believe “God stretched out the heavens” is something we can continue to observe, because the farther away you point your telescope, the further back the history that you get to witness. This is not virtual history, it’s real history. This is what Mike Bay is referring to when he talks about the COBE Satellite.
But I am not fine with 99.99% of history being virtual history.
If you are fine with 99.99% of history being virtual history then us having a fruitful discussion will not be possible.
Mike,
Sorry I got behind in our discussion. Thanks for your patience. I assume that your decision to change the subject means that you have no COBE argument to discuss with me. You don’t have to explain why you boldly brought it up and then dropped it, of course, but as you can imagine, it makes me wonder what went wrong.
Your final two comments yesterday (December 21 at 7:54 and 8:09 pm) were full of your guesses about my claims. It might have been more helpful if you had listed your own claims and asked for my comments. As it is, I feel a need to correct your wrong guesses. At least the opening premise, where you quoted me directly, is accurate.
I certainly do not believe “that God’s creative activity falls outside of space-time.” I suppose God might perform miracles outside of space-time, but if he ever does this without informing us, we would never know about it. All of his miracles that we do know about were performed in space-time. For example, a multitude was fed on a shore of the Sea of Galilee (that’s the space) after Jesus had crossed that body of water (that’s the time). We can still see what God created miraculously and later cursed miraculously everywhere we look in our world—all in the observable universe and in our time.
Obviously, anything done in the past (miraculous or not) is impossible to observe and quantify in our time. We may be able to read testimony about it or study currently available physical evidence to speculate about it, but if we are interested in a miracle done in the past, the latter approach under methodological materialism (the no-miracle presupposition) is almost guaranteed to result in a misleading history.
I have already repudiated the idea of virtual layers, even virtual solid objects of any kind. History, however, can be real or virtual, depending on whether it covers events that actually happened or not. You may have to ask a geologist about “erosion layers.” I have never written about such a thing. I have not proposed a history for any sedimentary layer, but I have clearly pointed out that Dr. Aardsma (Ph.D. in nuclear physics) does not have to conclude that God must have created all of them before Day 3, provided they are dated by modern geologists to be more than 7,200 years old. They might have been deposited naturally since 5176 B.C. but assigned a greatly exaggerated age, for example. They might have been affected by the curses covered in Genesis 3. We can only speculate about details not given in the Bible, and the history of geologic strata is definitely in this category. Investigative thinking can flourish here for sure.
I claim that all of ancient history is outside the proper realm of science, but I have never claimed that the Flood of Noah cannot be subject to investigative thinking just because some miracles must have been involved (Gen. 6:7,13; 7:4,16; 8:1). Dr. Aardsma has written a whole book to report the results of his investigations. I have used the miracle of the feeding of a multitude (John 6:1-13) before, and in this context, even though expert study of the leftover food could lead someone to a write misleading history of it, the same would not be true of a secular biography about the boy who sacrificed his lunch or about any of the other people who ate there that day. Please do not exaggerate.
As far as I know, nothing “was created outside the realm of our space-time.” We may not know for sure whether a given object is older than 7,200 years or not. If someone can see it or touch it or somehow detect it in our time, it is fair game for study or “investigative thinking” under the assumption that the laws of physics have applied ever since God finished his creation. To put it simply, everything in creation can be studied. Please do not set up a straw man.
No one has “to harmonize with the atheists” or to reinterpret Genesis “to harmonize with what atheists say about the origin of the universe, life on earth,” and so on. This is not one of my premises, bad or otherwise. I was under the impression that Perry thought such harmonization was possible and covered the topic in his book, so I asked for reassurance that certain items of interest were included. So far, he has ignored my request, but I don’t hold it against him. He is a busy man, and besides this, those specific items might have been too challenging for him to cover. You have raised my curiosity, however. Can *you* suggest a harmonization for each item I listed? If so, please feel free to share them here.
You claim that I think this debate is black and white, a sort of false dichotomy, but you are wrong. If I ever said or suggested such a thing here, please point me to the comment. It probably needs to be clarified. Dr. Aardsma and I evidently do not belong squarely in either camp that you described, and I suppose that you and Perry are in two other different camps. I am not even going to try to count them all.
You like the “YEC” label, and it certainly has been well established in general usage, but as far as I am concerned, the earth is not “young” in any sense. In my view, nothing in all of creation is older than the earth, which was created “in the beginning” along with the heavens (Gen. 1:1). I suspect that most people in the “YEC” camp actually agree with me on this point, but old habits are hard to break. The biblical chronology proposed by Dr. Aardsma has the date of creation at about 5176 B.C., but this has not yet been widely accepted.
Since you no longer care about COBE and have so much trouble grasping my positions on the topics we have discussed so far, what do you think of moving on to something like this?
https://creation.com/what-all-atheists-have-to-believe
https://creation.com/summer-in-the-enemys-camp
Here are links for video clips that cover the same articles but with some additional comments. You can rest your eyes while you listen.
https://creation.com/media-center?fileID=da1prVMK124
https://creation.com/media-center?fileID=stpdTVh0_z8
Tom believes there is no history prior to 7200 years ago. What is there to discuss??? Tom holds to the Young Earth Creation paradigm.
Tom says, “but as far as I am concerned, the earth is not “young” in any sense. In my view, nothing in all of creation is older than the earth, which was created “in the beginning” along with the heavens (Gen. 1:1).”
Not young? Tom considers 7200 years to be old.
Tom says, “History, however, can be real or virtual, depending on whether it covers events that actually happened or not.”
How do you know which physical evidence “happened” or not. Happened? Some rock layers did not happen? This is Tom’s view. Anything that might be construed as happening before say 10,000 BC NEVER HAPPENED. Just POOF. They just appeared on the 6×24 hour week of creation. Those ‘old’ layers are not part of history. WHAT ARE THEY A PART ??? Narnia?
My birth is recorded. I know where the original document is. The eruption of Mt Rainier a long, long time ago is recorded. You can see the ash layers. Both are histories. My DNA holds recorded history.
Tom does not have the paradigm capacity to discuss any ancient history because none of it is real to him. Sad.
Tom, how far away in Andromeda? How long has it taken the light to get here. Wrong! Tom believes that God had been expanding the Universe since 7200 years ago. How large was it originally? Must have been 14400 light years across. The edge must have been 7200 light years from us. The light left the edge and it has taken 7200 years to reach us. Meanwhile the universe has expanded I guess about the speed of light. So the edge was close to us 7200 years ago but it appears billions of light years now. So the universe has expanded billions of light years in 7200 years. Do the math.
Or maybe Tom thinks the expansion we see now occurred in the week of creation. God expanded the universe faster than the speed of light? If the Universe was stretched in a week I guess God stopped stretching it on day 6. Millions of light years expansion every hour! What about the deceleration on day 6?!?! Sure, let’s talk about the speed of light. Maybe God changed it. Maybe the speed was infinite in creation. Anyway to document that?
It might help Tom to go to an Astronomy 101 class and also to a Geology 101class. And if so ever talk about DNA in this thread he should take a Biochemistry 401 class at a major University to get up to speed. 🙂
Byw the only thing I’m going to discuss with Tom is the 7200 years. I am not done with this 🙂
Perry,
Thanks for warming up to the idea of virtual history in the case of certain miracles. The way you worded your concession suggests to me that you have not yet thought this through carefully. History does not create anything. Animate beings (historians) tell or write history about past events. The history so told or written can be true or false or a mixture. If the history was honestly based on a study of physical evidence without reference to credible testimony and interpreted under the no-miracle presupposition, it could still be true or false or a mixture. After all, a report by a forensic scientist is not necessarily false, but it could be. People are not infallible.
In the case of the “multiplying loaves and fishes and water to wine” miracles, such a history is bound to be at least partly false, because it will have nothing to say about the miracle that really did take place. Instead of reporting the miracle, this history will present purely natural explanations for whatever was included in the study of physical evidence. This imaginary history is what Aardsma calls virtual history. It certainly will not “look like virtual history” to anyone who rejects miracles, but anyone who is sure the miracle was performed as reported in a separate history can call the imaginary history “virtual history,” however skillfully and honestly it was proposed.
We may actually be much closer to agreement than you realize, but you are still bothered by the difference between 0.01% of history and 99.99% of history, right? Well, this should not be a problem either, once you realize that those percentages are bogus. After all, 100% of what really happened in the past is real history, and none of it is virtual history. This applies even to the miracles that you imagined might be 0.01% of history.
There is no actual calculation behind the 0.01% figure, right? You just drew a number out of thin air. In reality, the true percentage is irrelevant. Remember that a virtual history of the wine or leftover food could extend all of the way back to a Big bang event, depending on the exuberance of the experts called in to write a history. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that what really happened was a miracle without endless ages of natural processes unfolding as usual to produce the wine or the food. Any history that leaves out the miracle is wrong. It’s just virtual history. This works the same way regardless of the miracle of interest, even the miracle of creation in six days and the miraculous curses that followed.
Thanks, too, for finally coming back to the speed of light issue. You ought to know that unless your telescope is pointed at a nearby object that blocks the view of deep space, it will necessarily be pointed as far away as it can be used to see, but this detail is beside the point. I think you were just claiming that whatever stretching God did in the past can actually be observed in our time, because we can observe nearby galaxies and some that are supposed to be billions of light-years away. Have you seen this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
As that article explains, the Hubble constant is not really constant. Nevertheless, you may still be confident that you have an irrefutable reason for believing your claim, but you have not identified your presuppositions. What are they? Is one of them the no-miracle presupposition? How do you know that God did not miraculously stretch out the heavens at a much faster rate before Day 7 than any of the observed rates or rates theorized based on modern observations? As you think through this, you ought to take into account the fact that we have not yet found the physical outer edge of the universe. Are we even sure that it has an outer edge? I think some humility is in order as we speculate about the stretching God may have done in the beginning. If you disagree, please explain.
I think my main point still holds. If galaxies can actually be 45.7 billion light-years away from us now, even though they have existed for at most 13.8 billion years, in theory, and this discrepancy can be explained without any appeal to miracles because of the natural expansion of space, then I think it follows that a miraculous expansion of space could have the same effect. Those same galaxies might have actually existed for only about 7,200 years. Do you honestly have a good reason to believe that this could not possibly be true? Remember that a believer has no obligation to explain how the aftermath of a miracle could have been achieved through purely natural means. I believe the Day 4 work was a miracle or series of miracles.
“Remember that a virtual history of the wine or leftover food could extend all of the way back to a Big bang event, depending on the exuberance of the experts called in to write a history. It doesn’t really matter.”
Tom, it does matter. It matters in the extreme to nearly everyone I know who takes science or history seriously.
But not to you.
In reading what you have written, it is clear that you will evade straightforward evaluation of scientific data in order to retain your extremely particular interpretation of genesis. You go so far as to insist that science cannot be used to determine history at all – at least not for anything that happened more than 7200 years ago.
I am not willing to do that.
One of my most basic presuppositions is that God does not lie. This means that if two stars are 100 million light years away, and we can watch them collide, then we are witnessing a true event (not a virtual event) that happened in space and time 100 million years ago.
But your presupposition is that if your English Bible says “day” then day MUST mean 24 hours; and that means the earth was created ~7200 years ago and everything before that is virtual history. You also interpret everything in Genesis 1 as a miracle rather than natural process, even though the text doesn’t actually say whether it’s a miracle or natural process or both.
I personally think “virtual history prior to 7200 years ago” is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever encountered in all my years of discussing this with people.
Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re a very nice man and I respect you as a person. And I wish you well. But I think your epistemology is deeply and fatally flawed.
We operate from incompatible presuppositions. You said that you would engage with the geology book but you have relegated 99% of history to virtual history. So you are not actually engaging with it at all.
And given those incompatible presuppositions, it is a waste of time to continue to discuss this with you. I will not do so anymore.
I consider this conversation a poor use of my valuable time and I’m done engaging. This is my last reply to you.
If you want to discuss this with others who are willing, then that is up to them.
Best wishes.
Expanding your universe? Tom, what gives you the idea it has or is expanding? Are you looking at today’s speed of light and the red shift? Tom thinks the Poof the universe existed out of nothing in it’s current form. The constellations are in about the same location as they were thousands of years ago. We know. People back then saw and named them. Minimal shifting. Meaning the universe is about the same now as in was on day 8 after the creation. So either the universe expanded at an incredible rate in 6 days or less or it was created exactly as we see it today. Tom, which was it? Exactly the same or expanded? How can you tell? So if the universe expanded at an infinite rate then you believe the galaxies there in rotated many times… all in a few hours? Yes, I think the universe is expanding but meanwhile fallacies are turning and colliding. You want to have it all. For you this is the great deception…
Water to wine. Jesus simply brought the ingredients together. It would be like creating 1 layer. We don’t see Jesus creating a hospital or a herd of cattle. The are very finite points of creation. Very limited. What is the history of wine? Well, what if a biochemist makes wine in the lab. Ethanol and some artificial flavoring and Kazam you’ve got wine. No history. No virtual history. Wine made in an hour.
… I agree w Perry. This is just a waste of time
Perry,
No answer to even one of my questions about the speed of light issue? All I get now is a repeat of your original argument? Back in your December 22, 2017, 3:39 pm, comment to me, you said, “Start with the speed of light. Once you’ve squarely and honestly dealt with that, we can go from there.” I had already dealt with it squarely and honestly long ago, so after months of your ignoring my proposed resolution, I was delighted that you wanted to bring it up again. In my December 22, 5:46 pm, reply to you, I repeated my idea and invited your feedback. You responded the next day at 4:10 pm by including one short paragraph on it with a vague rationale for rejection. The same day at 10:51 pm, I appealed for clarification of your rationale and tried to clarify my own ideas further.
Now you say we are done because of the virtual history issue. If someone treated *you* this way, how would you rate his level of confidence in his argument? Thanks for at least passing the ball, for whatever reason, to Mike or anyone else who may feel inclined to carry it for you. In the meantime, what good reason do I have to change my mind?
Thanks for your kind and gracious words about me. I have tried to participate here in good faith by diligently answering almost all questions. At the same time, I have avoided *ad hominem* attacks and not distorted what other participants actually wrote while posing as an expert on their views, positions, or presuppositions who is saddened or astonished by their bad judgment. Hopefully, wise readers of these comments will recognize this straw man tactic as a pitiful sign of desperation, and anyone who has resorted to it will soon feel embarrassed enough to stop trying it.
Thank you for providing us a forum where one can dare to expose his ideas to critical scrutiny. I have often thought that all kinds of nonsense can be believed if only the problems with it can be ignored, dismissed, discredited, or somehow set aside. Turning a blind eye to problems may create a comfortable illusion that one’s current position is irrefutable, but if the truth matters, one ought to consider friendly criticism of the kind that could be appreciated through a forum like this. Of course, only people who engage with the criticism by answering the hard questions and addressing alleged problems can benefit from this exercise. If you *can* do this to your own satisfaction, your confidence is strengthened. Otherwise, you can stubbornly stay the course or humbly change your mind, an alternative that would allow you to defend your new position with rational arguments and improved confidence.
Best wishes to you too. If you ever change your mind about dropping out, just jump back in. I would welcome your feedback.
This comment is for people reading Perry’s December 24, 2017, 1:00 am, comment and assuming that every charge he made against me is holds water. I would like to plead not guilty to certain ones. Each numbered quotation below came from his comment addressed to me, and my clarification follows.
1. “In reading what you have written, it is clear that you will evade straightforward evaluation of scientific data in order to retain your extremely particular interpretation of genesis.”
No such evasion is required for me to retain my interpretation of Genesis. The Bible is my highest authority in any matter related to origins. As far as this discussion is concerned, I have not intentionally evaded any “straightforward evaluation” presented by any other participant, but if I have done this inadvertently, please just call it to my attention again, and I will do my best to address it honestly. I do reserve a right to question any tentatively proposed history of origins, especially if it is based on currently available physical evidence interpreted under methodological materialism (the no-miracle presupposition), or if some contrary evidence has been ignored, regardless of how straightforward the underlying analysis was. I think this should count as engagement, not evasion. After all, no secular history is infallible.
2. “You go so far as to insist that science cannot be used to determine history at all – at least not for anything that happened more than 7200 years ago.”
This insinuates that my insistence is preposterous — and I suppose it may seem that way to anyone who judges what the Bible plainly says about origins to be less trustworthy than what modern experts have tentatively proposed. I think that people in this category reject Genesis as myth or legend, or else they find a convenient way to reinterpret it. Either way, they discredit its truth claims about history or consider them overruled by their higher authority to whatever extent is necessary to achieve harmony or eliminate problems. For these people, there are billions of years of real universe history that happened more than 7,200 years ago, no miracle is required to explain anything that happened before mankind came into existence, and the ongoing process of evolution means that the work of creation was never really completed as claimed in Genesis.
Skeptics like me treat the Bible as the highest authority and prefer to interpret it in a more or less traditional or straightforward manner. As far as we are concerned, nothing in real history happened before God’s miraculous and promptly finished creative activity during the six days described in Gen. 1:1-2:3 and Ex. 31:17, unless we are talking about a history of God’s abode in eternity past. For us skeptics, my approach is not even controversial, let alone preposterous. We discredit any truth claims about history inconsistent with the Bible and consider them overruled to whatever extent is necessary to achieve harmony or eliminate problems. Someone can write a history with stories about events dated earlier than the date of creation according to biblical chronology, of course, but to be consistent, we conclude that at least the date assignment for those events must be in error, if they actually did take place. An origin story written by a scientist wearing his historian hat is not considered infallible or even just more authoritative than what God told us in Genesis.
3. “But your presupposition is that if your English Bible says ‘day’ then day MUST mean 24 hours; and that means the earth was created ~7200 years ago and everything before that is virtual history.”
This is not my presupposition at all, but the claim misleads in other ways. I can read Bibles in other languages, so it is not just one “English Bible” that guides my interpretation of Genesis 1 with regard to the length of time God spent finishing his work of creation. Like probably every other creationist, I recognize that *yom* in the original Hebrew text of Gen. 2:4 can also be translated *day*, and this must not mean 24 hours. The part of this verse translated “in the day that” in the KJV is actually an idiomatic expression better translated *when* (as in the NIV). We also recognize that “day” in Gen. 1:5a,14-18 refers to just the well illuminated part of a day, generally after sunrise and before sunset. I have explained elsewhere why “day” in Genesis 1 must refer to an ordinary day, not to an eon, millions of years, or any other such vague or poorly-defined period of time.
Even after the intended meaning of “day” is properly identified, I certainly do not presuppose that this “means the earth was created ~7200 years ago.” The exact date of creation in biblical chronology has been unsettled for a long time, but the 4004 B.C. date proposed by Archbishop James Ussher may be the most famous and long-standing one of all. Actually, every proposed exact date is based on far more than what Perry alleged in quotation 3. The genealogies in Genesis and other chronological information elsewhere in the Bible are all needed too. I like the 5176 B.C. date (plus or minus 26 years) proposed by Gerald E. Aardsma, but it has not yet been widely accepted. In any case, no date of creation based on a reasonable and straightforward biblical chronology is millions or billions of years in the past.
4. “You also interpret everything in Genesis 1 as a miracle rather than natural process, even though the text doesn’t actually say whether it’s a miracle or natural process or both.”
This is an unfair exaggeration of my position. What I consider miraculous is just what the text states that God did. For example, I do not interpret the evenings and mornings as miracles. I assume that those terms refer to a natural daily process of changing illumination. I also assume that normal processes of nature began to operate as soon as God finished the work he did on a given day. For example, the text says that God wanted birds to fly (Gen. 1:20). The miracle in this case was the sudden creation of birds, not their flying around after creation, which I assume would have been subject to their God-given instincts, normal laws of physics, and natural biological processes.
5. “We operate from incompatible presuppositions. You said that you would engage with the geology book but you have relegated 99% of history to virtual history. So you are not actually engaging with it at all.”
I suppose this is the most egregious distortion that Perry decided to put out there. I “have relegated” *zero* percent of real history (what actually took place) “to virtual history.” By definition, virtual history is a story about what did *not* happen, even though to someone speculating about the past, it may appear to have happened, based on available physical evidence interpreted under the no-miracle presupposition.
Perry and I disagree about how many years of real universe history there are. Perry’s latest figure of 99% is an even more astonishing underestimate than the 99.99% figure he gave me earlier. The 13.8-billion-year length of history that he appears to accept is neither 100 nor 10,000 times longer than the length I accept. It is more than 1.9 million times longer! His claim with a wild guess figure appears to be just his way of insisting that he must be right while I must be wrong, based on the work of authorities that *he* has accepted as trustworthy. I insist that *they* are wrong, based on the authority of the Bible, God’s word. The magnitude of the difference in history length is far less important to me than the *reason* for it, which probably would not change even if today’s tentatively estimated length of 13.8 billion years is later revised to 13.8 trillion years.
Any attempt to resolve this key difference ought to involve a discussion of our rationale for preferring one authority over the other, but Perry evidently considers this a waste of time. This may explain why he has ignored my recent invitations to discuss the faint young sun paradox and Aardsma’s announced discovery of an experimental, anti-aging vitamin under circumstances that suggest the genealogical information provided in Genesis is quite accurate. I can only guess whether he considers these topics too problematic for his established position to risk discussing them and raising doubts. Maybe he has good reasons to dismiss them but can’t spare the time to explain them here. Aardsma’s alleged genealogy confirmation ought to suggest that my choice of authority is not necessarily just a presupposition.
Perry also mentioned a geology book in quotation 5. Last July, he demanded that I read it as a prerequisite for further engagement. Contrary to his claim, I never told him that I *would* engage with it, but I actually did engage with it thoroughly as I read it. I even gave him a link to a book review about it that I posted on the Amazon website and told him that I had taken pages of notes. I suspect he never read my review, but if he had, he should have noticed that virtual history is not even mentioned in it. This issue has absolutely nothing to do with my level of engagement with the book.
If Perry thought that I should still be engaging with it, even though I finished it weeks ago, he should have told me about something in particular that I might have overlooked or not properly considered. (I still own the book.) I guess that he had nothing specific in mind, other than virtual history, but wanted to throw in an insult related to the quality of my scholarship. I don’t hold it against him, but I hope he regrets the need to stoop to such irrational, unwarranted tactics in my case. It’s not like him to do that. If this comment passes moderation, he certainly deserves praise for his patience and sense of fairness and common courtesy.
Mike,
Thanks for taking the time to discuss your preferred topic with me. I hope you had a merry Christmas.
We surely agree that there is no history to discuss that covers what happened, if anything, before the universe came into existence. (Please correct me if this is not the case.) I think this means that we can discuss our reasons for accepting radically different dates for this key event in history. Mine is about 5176 B.C. based on biblical chronology, and I assume that yours is about 13.8 billion years ago, which is what modern experts have tentatively proposed, based on their study of physical evidence interpreted under methodological materialism, the no-miracle presupposition. (Again, please correct me if this is not the case. Let’s not waste our time with straw man nonsense.)
You asked, “Not young?” You tell me. To help you think this through, compress the alleged 13.8-billion-year age of the universe down to 80 years, and compress the alleged 4.5-billion-year age of the earth proportionately. How old would the earth be after this compression? I figure it would be about 26 years old. Now if an 80-year-old man can be reasonably considered an old man, what about a 26-year-old man? Would you say he is young or old? I would say he is young, and this is why the earth seems to me to be young in your paradigm, not in mine, where nothing in all of creation is older than the earth. A man who is 7,200 years old would be extremely old, right? If my analysis of this makes no sense to you, please explain where you think I went wrong.
You wanted me to tell you how I know “which physical evidence ‘happened’ or not.” That’s easy. All currently observable rock layers and all other such physical evidence *did* happen to come into existence somehow. You also guessed, “Some rock layers did not happen? This is Tom’s view. Anything that might be construed as happening before say 10,000 BC NEVER HAPPENED. Just POOF. They just appeared on the 6×24 hour week of creation. Those ‘old’ layers are not part of history. WHAT ARE THEY A PART ??? Narnia?” Your birth certificate is a short history that covers very few events, one for each distinct date on it. A baby is not a history. Neither is an ash layer. Neither is your DNA. Neither one of those specifies an event or has a date on it. You have a badly distorted recollection of what I have been saying about this.
Maybe it is because you confuse data with history. I tried to explain the difference a week ago in a comment for you dated December 19, 2017 at 6:30 pm, especially paragraphs 4 through 6. Maybe you didn’t read down that far, or maybe what I wrote there was too complicated for you to follow or remember. Perry evidently had the same trouble, and I patiently tried to explain it to him, hopefully even better, in a comment dated December 22, 2017 at 10:36 am, especially paragraphs 2 through 5. If you are still confused, I suggest that you read or reread those older explanations and ask me questions to clarify whatever might not be clear yet. Otherwise, I think we just argue in circles, and this is a silly waste of time.
While you are at it, you may want to consider what would happen if geologists posing as historians kept every bit of their proposed history except for the dates that seem to be inconsistent with biblical chronology. They might explain that various dates have been proposed but are not known to be accurate because of conflicting interpretations of evidence, such as radiometric dates and experimentally determined decay rates for soft tissue components found in dinosaur remains. What practical application of geology would this new approach ruin, if any, and why?
You wrote, “Tom does not have the paradigm capacity to discuss any ancient history because none of it is real to him. Sad.” No, *all* of ancient history as told in the Bible is as real to me as it can be. Your remark looks to me like a silly, fallacious insult that does not belong in a serious, rational discussion.
Thanks for picking up the ball that Perry dropped when he decided to quit discussing the speed of light issue. I am moving on to your second December 23, 2017, comment, the one where you go back to distorting what I actually wrote while posing as an expert on my views. That’s the old straw man tactic. Let’s be serious.
Where have I ever said that God has been expanding the universe “since 7200 years ago”? Isaiah told us that God stretched out the heavens (Is. 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 51:13,16) without stating exactly when this stretching began or when it ended or will end, if ever. Modern astronomers are free to speculate based on observations.
You wanted me to tell you how long it has taken for light from the Andromeda galaxy to get here, right? I would expect Perry or a secular astronomer to answer with confidence that it has taken about 2.5 million years, based on the speed of light, plus the distance to the galaxy as determined by interpreting currently available physical evidence and applying currently acceptable reasoning and presuppositions. This approach gives you the theoretical answer. As you may know, even though the galaxy can be seen with the naked eye, what you see has no date tag on it. No one has ever started a stopwatch when light left the galaxy and stopped it when it finally arrived at earth so that a direct measurement of elapsed time could be reported. The Bible does not mention even one galaxy as such, not even Andromeda, so theory or speculation is the best anyone can do. What is the worst consequence of this that you can imagine? What if we had no answer to your question at all? What if our best answer is that it could not have taken more than about 7,200 years?
How large was the Andromeda galaxy originally? Does anyone have a photograph of it as it appeared when it first formed? I think you are again stuck with pure speculation as the answer to your question. Have you seen this?
https://www.space.com/38690-oldest-spiral-galaxy-ever-seen-detected.html
The article claims that researchers could “look 11 billion years back in time and directly witness the formation of the first, primitive spiral arms of a galaxy,” but we ought to agree that including “the formation of” stretches the truth, unless someone witnessed the formation process unfolding since the recent discovery. How do we know the age of the galaxies seen in the image provided? In theory, it may show how they appeared when they were already over 2.5 billion years old, leaving still unanswered your question about the original size of a newborn galaxy. We should suspect that the true size could vary widely from one galaxy to another. The Bible does not settle your question either. We are free to speculate to our heart’s content. What might happen to us if we have to live with this mystery forever?
Most of the rest of your long paragraph on Andromeda is speculation about what happened in the distant past, evidently based neither on Genesis nor on a study of physical evidence. You told me to do the math, but this is supposed to be your argument, not mine. Please do the math yourself and explain the connection.
My own argument is simple. If galaxies can actually be 45.7 billion light-years away from us now, even though they have existed for at most 13.8 billion years, in theory, and this discrepancy can be explained without any appeal to miracles, because of the natural expansion of space, then I think it follows that a miraculous expansion of space could have the same effect. Those same galaxies might have actually existed for only about 7,200 years. Here are two more articles for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
https://www.space.com/24073-how-big-is-the-universe.html
Obviously, my argument involves no math. Too many unknowns. It was a miracle, after all, and I am under no obligation to explain how the aftermath of a miracle could have been achieved as purely natural processes unfolded. If you tell me, “It would take a miracle for God to make all of those stars only about 7,200 years ago and yet allow us to see them already in our time, including even the most distant ones,” I would reply, “Okay, so what? Is anything too hard for God (Gen. 18:14; Jer. 32:17,27: Luke 1:37)? Am I supposed to be able to explain *how* he did this?”
I understand that you like a history of the universe that stretches back far more than 7,200 years. Do you also believe that God made the stars (Gen. 1:16)? Do you accept the claims made in the Isaiah passages I cited? If so, at what point in history do you suppose God did something? What do you think he did at that time? How did he set the Andromeda galaxy in the heavens? How do you know this history is correct?
You also suggested that I take classes “to get up to speed,” but this recommendation looks like unwarranted, patronizing, *ad hominem* nonsense to me. Let’s be serious. If I say anything that you know is wrong, I welcome correction. Otherwise, let’s focus on the issues before us, please. You can best demonstrate your own depth of knowledge through a cogent, well-articulated presentation of your own arguments.
Tom posted on 2017-12-26 3:11PM, “…For these people (old earthers), there are billions of years of real universe history that happened more than 7,200 years ago, no miracle is required to explain anything that happened before mankind came into existence, and the ongoing process of evolution means that the work of creation was never really completed as claimed in Genesis…”
NO MIRACLE… Tom has thrown all Old Earthers into the NO MIRACLE bandwagon. Tom has capsulated the crux of the matter right here.
The Christian of today is caught between 2 world views. 1) the Christian believes the heavens and the earth were created less than 10,000 years ago by the Creator God in a miraculous 6 day period of creative activity or 2) the Christian believes the heavens and the earth are billions of years old and that the ‘creative activity’ was actually the fruit of random events in the neoDarwinian evolution paradigm. The modern Christian believes it’s one of the other. Some Christians seek an inbetween position that incorporates the billions of years with the Creator God doing something worthwhile along the way but they have no idea what God may have done. And a few Christians believe that the Creator God engineered the heavens and earth at the start to be self-directing the evolutionary process… Did I leave anyone out???
Tom is a dear fellow who sees things as black and white. He sees only 2 options. He holds to the 6 day creation and dismisses the notion of the billions of years and everything said to have happened during those years.
Tom is a clear representative of the Young Earth Creationists or YEC.
The issue I’m taking up hear is Tom’s insistence that the old age paradigm is devoid of miracles. True, the neoDarwinian evolutionists argue that there were no miracles. Their interpretation of the data has no room for miracles. Miracles are given no room in their writings.
However, not all old earthers agree with this premise. That includes me.
I am an old earther. I have reviewed an overwhelming amount of evidence and hold to the notion that the heavens and the earth are billions of years old. I am also a Biblical creationist in the sense that the Creator God designed the heavens and earth and in particular life as we know it. Design and life are the hallmarks of the living creator God. Design and life are not the products of random events.
Tom needs to build a third alternative in his thinking. Therein fit I.
I will summarize my position.
The age issue is settled with the COBE research. Let the reader read up on the details. This was science at it’s finest. COBE has established that the universe had a definitive beginning and that the start date was 14-15 billion years ago. I am approximating. They have nailed it closer.
For those familiar with the genetic code… the code is information. Design is very obvious to those who study this. It’s easy to get caught up in the weeds in studying the details. You have to stand back, take a breather and look at the forest. The life code was designed. The complexity is incredible. The odds of this coming together by chance is zero.
One of my long-time hangups was ‘What about Adam?’ A cursory review of the literature on pseudogenes has led my to believe that Adam was in the bloodline of the lower primates. And therefore, so are we.
The Genesis account says that the Creator God created Adam. And what I see in the newly revealed historical record of DNA… is that we are all bloodline connected to the primates… meaning that Adam was created out of ‘preexisting life’. We and Adam have carried the remnants of pre-Adamic life in our genetic code.
There are thousands of pseudogenes. There are different kinds. An easy way to see the forest here… many of our genes are duplicated. And amongst the duplications there are genes that are damaged. They have been mutated. A single base change in the DNA can alter it’s translated product so that it is inactive or weakly active. You can take one of these gene sets and lay out the bases and identify the one with the damage. Again, 1 base change can make the gene ineffective or non-working… These non-working genes have persisted in the code because they don’t kill the lifeform. They are non-lethal. They are passed down from generation to generation… The YEC crowd will say ‘they have function’. Well, some may but most have no function.
And they number in the thousands. Prevalent. Over time there has been a lot of mutations.
Now this is where it gets interesting… Many of these pseudogenes have been identified in our pre-human ancestors. The tree of life is pretty mangled. We don’t know the exact line of descent leading up to humans. But you can find these pseudogenes all throughout the tree. And some of our seemingly closest bloodline relatives have the exact same pseudogenes. They have the same errors in their DNA code as we do…
The YEC maintain that the creator God used a master plan to build life in the days of creation. Well, the master plan is riddled with errors. Documented errors. It’s like seeing cars coming off the assembly line with errors. Cars having the same errors. If you walked far enough back on the assemble line you’ll find where the error was made. Maybe it was a die tooled incorrectly. Maybe it was the workers making a systematic error. If you look, you’ll find it.
I do think that the Creator God had master plans in mind. And I think God built those designs at points in time. And over the millennia those designs have been altered by mutations… If you track backwards on the assembly line of time we will eventually find what the originally built designs looked like down to their DNA sequencing and regulation.
Think about the medical advancements that will be made when we know exactly what God put together in the life forms that first carried new designs…
I get ahead of myself… Back to Adam… the Genesis account says that God put Adam to sleep and from out of Adam God created the woman. Now maybe this Adam was the one who was to live in the garden and eat the fruit. Or maybe this Adam was a generic human since Adam means a human as I’ve understood it… It makes no difference. At some point in time the creator God put an Adam to sleep and created a woman out of Adam…
I am proposing this paradigm shift… The Creator God did this process thousands if not millions of times over hundreds of millions of years… God put to sleep a creature and performed a design adjustment or design innovation. And then God work the creator and let it go to live and reproduce.
And what would the process have been? What exactly was God doing while the creature was asleep or paused? I don’t know. But I do know a bit about how aircraft are built… Nowadays aircraft designers can build planes on their computer systems before any parts are even made. They can adjust the shape of the wing and then run a computer simulation of the air flow over the wing. They can virtually see the plane in flight. As they change one bolt for another they can simultaneously see how the plane responds in flight… If we can do this, God can do it and even better… It takes little imagination to see God at work on the molecular level adjusting DNA code and systems of regulation and simultaneously seeing the newly designed component in action in the living creature now and in the future. The Bible tells us God is outside of this realm. God does not dwell here. But God visits and walks and talks in this realm at various times. The creative work is God visiting the creature and performing a creative work of design in the creature and watching the life of the creature and it’s descendants far into the future. In our time it may have only taken a few moments.
But the creative work was written in the genetic record and is permanent down through history. The destructive work of the mutations has damaged the record but now that we can reveal the complete genetic code of life forms we now have the capability of connecting the dots and seeing a grand picture of the genetic coding that has been hidden until now.
Now Tom of course will pooh pooh all of this because it falls outside of his 7200 year history. I would be interested in Tom’s analysis of the pseudogene enigma. They are inconvenient facts…
Tom writes, “By the way, I am not claiming that God created those layers instantaneously, fossils and all. The Bible does not tell us when or how the Grand Canyon or those layers were formed, ”
WRONG ANSWER. Your view of the Bible tells you that God created those layers and all their millions of fossils in the 24 hour days of creation. I’ll be generous and give you 72 hours. All the layers! The sediment layers in parts of the US go down over 10,000 feet. 72 hours. You are the one who needs to do the math, Tom. And don’t forget the millions of creatures embedded in those layers. Very small and very large. Like dinosaurs and dinosaur eggs. Creatures that flew and swam. Trilobites. Petrified logs with concentric annual rings turned into stone. Plate tectonic uplifts. We find sea shells on top of mountains… entombed in sediment layers. Lots of layers. You have 72 hours. Let’s hear how you squeeze all of this into 72 hours, Tom…
Mike,
Thanks for staying engaged. I understand that you feel frustrated and wonder whether this discussion is a waste of time. Image how I must feel. How would you feel if I ignored both your questions and your answers to my questions? How would you feel if I pretended to know what you believe and stated distorted versions of your beliefs? I think our discussion could be much more fruitful if we simply followed the Golden Rule in this regard. Let’s try.
I am behind in my responses to your earlier comments. I did not even see the one you wrote on Christmas Eve until after I wrote a long response to your two comments dated the day before, so I need to get to that one plus the two new comments you wrote today. This evening, however, I really want to go back and respond to your December 22, 3:55 pm, comment, which I evidently skipped over when I replied the last time. Recall that you dismissed my first response to your Grand Canyon challenge as meaningless “calculator jazz” (July 16, 2017, 8:55 pm), but the other day you told me, “Do the math.” My pleasure. I was hoping all along that you would take my old response more seriously. Please wait patiently for a response to your newer comments. I do want to address them too as time allows. Life goes on.
Now let’s consider the Grand Canyon layers again. You said, “We can make some intelligent guesses about time with these layers.” This may be true, but the people who wrote the book I reviewed evidently do not regard their Grand Canyon chronology as merely intelligent guesses. They seem to be quite sure that they know the times associated with the layers and charted them beautifully on the very last page of the book (p. 240). Even though none of the dates there are shown with a margin of error, we should assume that each date has one. No date is shown with a question mark, which suggests to me a high level of confidence.
Time is the focus of my “calculator jazz” study. Unfortunately, the book did not cover the same kind of study, and the chronology chart I mentioned did not even make it easy to do. I was hoping it would frame each unit or formation between two times, a time for deposit of its bottom and a later time for deposit of its bottom. Except for four formations (Supai Group, Chuar Group, Unkar Group, and Precambrian Basement Rocks), the chart actually shows only a single time instead. I have to assume this would be the time for deposit of the middle of a formation. As I explained in my July 14, 2017, 9:10 pm, comment for you, I am interested in the average thickness of an annual deposit, which is easy to calculate, so I am surprised that geologists have so little interest in doing this. Maybe it is because it might cast doubt on their Grand Canyon chronology.
The canyon exposes 6,093 feet or 73,116 inches of lithified sediments, and according to the chart, the bottom layer (Precambrian Basement Rocks) began to be deposited 1,850 million years ago. These figures imply an average annual thickness of 0.0000395 inches. At this rate, it would take 16 years for the lithified deposits to equal the thickness of a sheet of typical aluminum foil. That’s pretty filmy.
Of course there are supposed to be gaps, because millions of years of deposits were, in theory, swept away, so we really ought to repeat this exercise for a formation that is not supposed to include any significant gap. I suggested using the Redwall Limestone Unit last July. The chart does not give a range of dates for this one, but we can take the difference between its date (340 mya) and the date of the overlying Surprise Canyon Formation (323 mya) to get a period of time for deposit of the top half of one and the bottom half of the other. This difference is 17 million years. The chart also shows a range of thicknesses for each unit or formation. To be conservative, I use the larger end of the range in each case (RL 875 feet, SCF 400). Rounding up, I figure 640 feet or 7,680 inches of thickness for the two halves and get an average annual thickness of 0.00045 inches here, which is still only 5/7 (about seven tenths) of the thickness of a sheet of aluminum foil. That’s still filmy in my book.
What about other formations. For the Supai Group (800 feet or 9,600 inches in 30 million years), I get an average annual thickness of 0.00032 inches, about half the thickness of the foil. For the Chuar Group (6800 feet or 81,600 inches in 30 million years), I get an average annual thickness of 0.0027 inches, and for the Unkar Group (6940 feet or 83,280 inches in 100 million years), I get an average annual thickness of 0.00083 inches. I suspect the average thickness will be similarly thin for almost any layer that was supposed to be deposited over millions of years. If you know of some exceptions, I would be interested to know about them.
Why are filmy deposits a problem for evolutionists? Fossils generally need to be buried rapidly in sediments thick enough to cover them, and if you have thick sediments interspersed with practically no sediments for the thousands of years, necessary to maintain the filmy annual average, then you should find unconformities and evidence of erosion. If you came to a different conclusion, please explain.
I understand that the thickness of a deposit decreases after compaction and lithification, but when we also take bioturbation into account, I think the requirement for thickness to preserve fossils increases. One should also consider the typical rate of annual deposit based on current observations in environments that match what appears to be relevant for a given Grand Canyon layer. I think this kind of analysis of evidence may suggest that the generally accepted chronology is inflated. What do you think?
By the way, in the same December 22 comment, you bragged, “Like we can see easily tree rings. (BS Biology, UW. I know this tree ring stuff!)” reminding me of how I first started corresponding with Dr. Aardsma. He wrote an article on tree ring dating in a peer-reviewed journal back in 1993. I sent him a letter with a bunch of questions, he responded, and the discussion continued for months. Did you ever see his article (pp. 184-89)? His Ph.D. is in nuclear physics.
https://creationresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/crsq-1993-volume-29-number-4.pdf
He has changed his mind about the date of the Flood since then, as explained in detail in his Flood book.