There are Christians that believe that because science has come up with some theories on how life and the universe may have come into existence that science is a direct threat to their faith. In my opinion and many others, nothing could be further from the truth, but to take things one step further, these Christians believe science as a whole is on a mission to prove there is no God. This is all based on one very large presumption on their part, that the Bible is the ultimate authority on everything, that it should be read and interpreted exactly as it is written and that if anything challenges its authority the challenger must clearly be mistaken. That is in a nutshell the main reason why I have lived most of my life embarrassed to admit that I am a Christian.
Many Christians have been raised to believe that the universe was created in 6 days. Extrapolating information from the bible many Christians have come to believe that the earth is about 6,000 years old. I have never believed in a young earth and probably never will, but thats only because there is really no evidence to believe this to be true. The archaeological and geological findings all suggest that the earth is extremely old. Old enough to be measured in millions to even billions of years old, not thousands. There are many different methods to date different fossils and rocks, such as radioactive decay measurements, tree rings, glacial and sediment cores, etc. Since these methods essentially show that the world is much older than 6,000 years Christians naturally have attacked these methods and tried to disprove them.
I have never bothered to look into any of the young earth creation evidence before because I didn’t think it was worth my time and energy. However, since I’m on this journey to understand all the different ways of looking at things I decided to look into the alleged problems and inacuracies of carbon dating. If you do a search on carbon dating you will find a lot of creationist material bent on proving carbon dating to be inaccurate and unpredictable. You will not find much material fighting back against this opinion. That is because the arguments or “science” they use to justify their arguments is not in fact science at all and no scientist will believe that any of their claims deserves an ounce of their time.
There is no point in even opening a discussion because there is no science involved in their work whatsoever. They may think it is science, but as most scientists would say, its just a bunch of hand waving, which is a derogatory way of saying nice try, but try again. Any attempt to open a dialogue would result in each party simply talking past each other. Most of their scientific arguments originate out of highly outdated material and they cling to the tiniest little fraction of data that supports their argument while ignoring the vast majority of the data that shows it is actually a quite reliable and accurate dating tool.
All of their arguments did make me start to wonder if the technique is still in its infancy and is not quite developed yet. The more information I found the more I realized that carbon dating is actually a very mature science, which is why you see most of the Christian’s counterarguments based upon work that was done over 40 years ago. Back then there was a lack of understanding to how sensitive the specimens are to contamination, the concentration of carbon 14 in the atmosphere throughout history, etc. However, the current information indicates the technique is very well developed and when used properly is decently accurate. It has been cross-checked with multiple different independent dating techniques and I found it quite remarkable how thoroughly the technique has been investigated and refined. I found a journal article in Science magazine (probably the highest ranked science journal that exists) by H. Kitagawa et al (1) and in this paper it shows the accuracy of the technique when used on fossils to an age of 45,000 years old or newer. What is contained in that paper is real science with real evidence that demonstrates how remarkably accurate the technique truly is.
With all that said, I find it unnecessary to actually go into detail picking apart the creationists erroneous assumptions and sources of their information. What would be the point. I’m not going to change their minds and its not worth my time. I just have to learn to live as a Christian knowing that there are people out there that believe such things.
(1) Kitigawa, H, van der Plicht, J, Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production, Science 279, 1187 (1998).
Jonathan,
Your whole argument is based on what is called a “straw man argument” and name calling. In other words you set up the other side with a false understanding and make false over arching claims that are easy to beat down. It’s like making a man of straw to beat in a wrestling match. Easy. But the problem is that you are not wrestling with a real person but rather something you have fabricated from your brief look into their side. The problem is that many of the points you have made about the young earth creationist side are false and you show your ignorance of their evidence and views clearly. While you may have done a “little” looking into their side you have clearly not gone into much depth.
1 Peter 3:15 KJV – … Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have…
In my journey I have looked in depth into the young creationist side just to see what, if any, reasons they had for their beliefs. What I found was at first unbelievable to me, and simply blew my mind. The further I looked the more I found. To help you along your journey, I wanted to share with you some of the evidences and facts I have found along my own journey.
You talk about the pride of scientists that won’t even look at the evidence creationists present because “no scientist will believe that any of their claims deserves an ounce of their time.” That is simply stubborn pride. Richard Dawkins has the same pride about evidence against current Evolutionary beliefs.
Proverbs 18:12-13 Before his downfall a man’s heart is proud, but humility comes before honor. He who answers before listening– that is his folly and his shame.
First let me give some clarification to the Creationist perspective. Believe it or not there are documented 1000’s of scientists who could be labeled young earth creationists. To label them “not scientists” simply because they believe in a young earth is ludicrous. The scientific community has done the same thing with people who don’t believe in Neo Darwinian Evolution which you told me you don’t believe in either. Just check out the Ben Stein movie “Expelled.” Someone’s belief about our origins does not affect the fact they are able to study something using the same scientific method used by everyone else, which by the way was invented by a Creationist as a method to study God’s creation. In fact it’s generally those who go outside the box and come at things from a different perspective that have made some of the most helpful discoveries in science, like Galileo who was persecuted for suggesting that the earth went around the sun. By the box I’m referring to the current presuppositions believed by the majority of that day.
Creationist use the same evidence, the same data, the same fossil record, same rocks, same universe, the same laws of physics, and the same scientific method as secular scientists. What they don’t do is make the same assumptions about that data, they come at it from a different perspective. These different perspectives are like looking through different lenses. If someone looks through red lenses all they will see is red. If someone looks through clear lenses they see a much different view of the evidence. Each side of this debate of course believes everyone on the other side are the ones with the red lenses, but only by looking at the evidence from the different perspectives and seeing which conclusions best account for the evidence, can we even begin to know which side is looking through the clearer lenses. If you would like to see some of the most recent Creationist scientific research, I suggest you check out the RATE project. http://www.icr.org/rate/ They use the same scientific method they just come at the data with a different set of presuppositions, namely that the bible is accurate, and test their assumptions.
I tried to read the article you mentioned as being “Real Science.” To be honest most of it was way over my head and I had no idea what much of it was even talking about. One thing I did notice right away was the assumptions they made in their experiment. We all know that even though your math and calculations are 100% correct, if you make those calculations based on faulty assumptions your answer will be wrong. In the diagram on the top of the 2nd page it states, “we assumed a constant sedimentation during the Glacial period.” This is how they got some of their older dates. From this I can deduce 2 more assumptions they made as well. 1) They assumed an old earth, with millions of years; 2) they assumed uniformity, that things in the past are the same rates as they are today (with exception to the levels of c12/c14 ratios and c13/c14 ratios.) To truly understand why that is a big assumption and a problematic one you would have to have a much better understanding of the extent of the catastrophic events that would have occurred in the global flood. But that is another topic for another day.
If they were truly being scientific why didn’t they try their results with other assumptions as well? For example, fluctuating rates of layering, or at least a faster average rate and a slower average rate, then see what their results are with that and compare the data. Perhaps if they had done that there scales and ranges would have changed quite a bit. If there was a catastrophic global flood many of those layers could have been put down at once in a short period of time before the “Glacial period”. Also the layers could have been laid down at different rates during the “Glacial period.” They don’t know for a fact that the layers were made at a constant rate, which is why they had to make the “assumption” other wise it wouldn’t be an assumption.
Your article mentions Ice layers as one of the measuring tools that fit their findings. Secular science says that the dark layers are summer and the light layers are winter and that they can calculate at least 135,000 years ago from their deepest core sample which was 10,000 ft. In 1942 during world war 2 there was the “lost squadron” that landed in Greenland. A rich man decided to go find those lost planes and found that the planes were buried 263 feet into the ice in only 48 years. That works out to 5.5 feet/year. The deepest core sample they have taken is 10,000 ft/5.5 = 1,824 years. At 62 ft down they found a plywood cover used to mark the site, left only 8 years prior. 8ft/yr. We must keep in mind that the deeper layers are more compressed due to pressure from the layers on top but consider this. Bob Cardin was the man who dug out the plane and in digging it out he saw hundreds of layers, rather then expected 48. Why? Because they don’t represent summer/winter they represent warm/cold which could happen on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending on the season and weather patterns. A man in Alaska claimed that he got 15 distinct layers of snow on his car in only 8 hours. The other day I found an ice cube in my water at a Chinese restaurant that had about 8-10 distinct layers. My wife got a picture of it for me.
They also mention absolute tree ring record. I’m only aware of a maximum found of 11,400 rings as of 1993. There is much debate about whether or not multiple rings might have occurred during climatic times through out history which would make the dating a bit younger. But I can’t see how this measures up to the articles 45,000 years because tree rings can only account for the first quarter of their dating, which brings us back to some of their assumptions. Perhaps their data can match the tree ring data in less time, but I’m just speculating. It’s unclear to me from the article how exactly the records match up and what all they did for comparison.
You are accurate when you say there are other dating methods then carbon dating but let me describe the assumptions of some of these dating methods and what the limits of the dating methods are as these are extremely important when considering the reliability of the methods. I will try to keep this as brief as possible.
Carbon dating is only for dating animals, plants, and humans. It cannot be used to date rocks because of the assumption that must be made for it to work. In order for Carbon dating to be accurate we have to know the starting ratios, and the clock starts when the plant or animal dies. At the point of death no more c14 is coming in to the animal or plant and there for the c14 begins to decay. They figure out the ratios between c14 and c12 and based on that and the current ratios in our atmosphere they figure out the date. The half life of C14 is about 5,730 years. If the assumption of knowing the original ratios is accurate then this dating method should be accurate up to about 60,000 years. If the assumption is false then it is not an accurate method of dating. Here’s the big problem. Based on the amount of C14 being created in the atmosphere and the amount leaving the atmosphere, it should only take about 30,000 years to reach equilibrium of c14 in our atmosphere, where the amount coming in matches the amount leaving. This is why when W. F. Libby, who came up with radiocarbon dating and believed in the old age of the earth, chalked up his calculation of radiocarbon in the atmosphere being created 25% faster then it was leaving as simply an error in his calculations. The problem is that we are still not at equilibrium yet!! We are in fact about 25% off from equilibrium. How does that possibly fit with a 4.5 billion year old earth? It seems to point to earth being less then 30,000 years
If carbon-14 can only be measured to a maximum of 60,000 years then why is it that we find measurable amounts of c14 in things that are supposed to be millions of years old, such as diamonds, dinosaur bones, and petrified trees that are buried in basalt flows dated to hundreds of millions of years old? Conclusion: because they haven’t been around for millions of years, let alone billions.
Robert E. Lee, “Radiocarbon: Ages in Error,” Anthropological Journal of Canada, 1981, pp. 26-27.
“The troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably deep and serious. Despite 35 years of technological refinement and better understanding, the underlying assumptions have been strongly challenged…
It should be of no surprise, then, that fully half of the dates are rejected. The wonder is, that the remaining half came to be accepted. The implications of pervasive contamination and ancient variations in carbon-14 levels are steadfastly ignored by those who base their arguments upon the dates…
While the method cannot be counted on to give good, unequivocal results, the numbers do impress people, and save them the trouble of thinking excessively.”
Radioisotope Dating such as Uranium Lead dating or Potassium Argon dating are only for dating igneous and metamorphic rocks (basalts – lava flows) because of the assumptions required for this dating method to work. This method can not be used to date sedimentary rocks (limestone, sandstone, and shale) which is about a mile thick on the earths crust and most of the fossil record is found there. As I’m guessing you know sedimentary rock was all laid down by water (which fits the global flood theory). There are 3 main assumptions for these dating methods.
1) The starting amount of the daughter element is known
2) All the daughter element is due to radioactive decay
3) The sample was always in a closed environment (nothing being added or taken away)
4) The decay rate has always been constant.
The problem is we can’t know any of the assumptions are accurate. For these dating methods it is generally assumed that at the time the lava solidifies there is only the parent isotope and very little to none of the daughter isotope (U238 = parent and pb206 = daughter). There are reasons to belive the the decay rate may have gone much faster at times in the past then current rates do but I’ll skip that for now.
To test this method of dating here are some lava flows where we know when they happened and the dates given by the dating method.
Location expected measured
Hualalai basalt 200 yrs. .6 million yrs
Mt. Etna basalt 2100 yrs 25 my
Mt. Etna basalt 29 yrs 35 my
Mt Lassen plagioclase 85 yrs 11 my
Sunset Crater basalt 950 yrs 27my
Kilauea Iki basalt 40 yrs 8.5 my
Mt. Stromboli 38 yrs 2.4 my
Mt. St. Helens 23 yrs 2.8 million
I could go on but you get the idea. Generally when scientists get something dated they say where they found it and what they expect the date to be. Why? Because they get all sorts of ranges of dates depending on the different methods used. That is not scientific that is biasing the dates. They are simply selecting which ever date they THINK is closest to the age they EXPECT it to be. There is nothing scientific about that!
Some creationists went to the Gardenas basalt and got a sample of rock from the bottom layer, from the Precambrian period (4500 to 542 million years ago). They took it to a well known dating lab and simply said “date this rock.” They did not bias the dating. They used a few methods to date it and some of them multiple times. Here is what they came up with.
Five K-Ar model ages ranging from 791 to 853 million
Six Rb-sSr model ages ranging from 980 to 1100 million
One K-Ar isochron age and got 715 million
One Rb-Sr isochron age and got 1070 million
The lab decided to go with the K-Ar isochron age for the rock 715 million. The creationists then went back and took a sample from the top layer of the basaltic rocks of Uinkaret Plateau, from the Paleozoic period (should be younger 542 to 251 million years ago). Again they just said “date this rock,” and did not bias the data. Here were their results.
Six K-Ar model ages ranging from 0.01 to 17 million
Five Rb-Sr model ages ranging from 1270 to 1390 million
One Rb-Sr isochron age and got 1340 million
One Pb-Pb isochron age and got 2600 million
The lab went with the same dating method as before (Rb-Sr isochron) forthe date of the rock on the higher layer which was dated much much older then the rock on the lower layer by about 600 million years! The only dating method that gave a younger reading as compared to the previous dating ranged from 10,000 to 17 million years. That is a huge range, a huge amount of error, and clearly not accurate. None of the dates are even close to the age range for the period the rock was taken from. They are all too high or too low.
Here is my question to you. If we can’t get an accurate age of the rocks we know the age of, how can we possibly trust the dates of the rocks we don’t know the ages of? The facts scream out that these methods do not work for getting accurate ages and that the actual ages are really much younger.
Here are some methods of dating that I’m sure you probably haven’t even considered:
1) The accumulation of mud on the sea floor. At current rates the mud entering is about 20 billion tons per year, the rate of mud leaving due to subductive plate shifting is about 1 billion tons per year. The current mud is about 400 meters deep giving a maximum age of 15 million years not 4.5 billion as currently suggested by secular scientists. When you consider the possibility of a global catastrophic flood that age gets to be tremendously less.
2) The accumulation of salt in the oceans. At current rates the sodium into the oceans is about 450 million tons per year, and only about 27% of that salt comes out per year. Considering the current amounts of salt in the sea would give us a maximum age of 42 million years. Once again with a global flood the age becomes tremendously less.
3) Continental erosion. At present rates the continents would all be eroded in no more then 14 million years.
4) The loss of energy of earths magnetic field. It loses half its energy every 1,454 years giving a maximum age of about 20,000 years.
5) Biological material decay rate. Biological material decays with in about 10,000 years, yet scientists have found blood cells and soft tissue cells in T-Rex fossils supposed to be 56 million years old.
6) Things found in the ground. They found an iron pot in a chunk of coal. This was not just sitting in the coal, the coal was formed around it. If coal takes millions of years to form as secular scientists suggest and man has only been on this earth for a few thousand how is it possible that the coal formed around a man made object?
There is a similar problem with a hammer head found in the middle of a solid rock that was supposed to be 400 million years old. That doesn’t fit with the current secular times scales and dating but it fits well with the biblical account. Interesting fact about this hammer, in 1934 they cut a notch in the hammer with a file to see what kind of material it was. To this day it is still not rusted, that means it is a kind of stainless steel. That seems to point to a high level of intelligence, rather then the beliefs about how primitive man was in the past. There is much more I could go into about the high level of intelligence of ancient man, which fits well with the genesis account, but that is also another subject for another time.
I’d say that the majority of the data and evidence points to a young earth (only thousands of years old) not an old one that is millions or billions of years old. That’s the only reason I ever considered believing in a young earth. That also seems to fit the description of creation in Genesis and the genealogies pretty well. Now I don’t know the exact age of the earth. There are a lot of creation believing scientists that believe it is around 6,000 years old but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least around 10,000. I find it very hard to believe its much older then that. Sorry I got so long, believe it or not there is a lot I left out in order to keep this shorter.
Your friend and brother in Christ,
Jason
Jason
Lots of words, not much help. The most revealing thing you wrote was this. You write…
“If you would like to see some of the most recent Creationist scientific research, I suggest you check out the RATE project.
http://www.icr.org/rate/ They use the same scientific method they just come at the data with a different set of presuppositions, namely that the bible is accurate, and test their assumptions.”
This is what it all comes down to…if you want to start by looking at assumptions, this is yours. You start with the assumption that the bible is accurate. But what you mean by that is that it provides a true description of the processes (how) God used to create the current state of the world. You assume that Genesis intends to provide a scientific description and then proceed from that assumption and in my mind bend lots of stuff in your “scientific” quest to make the data “fit” your understanding about what Bible says. But I wonder if you can consider the possibility that you are forcing the Bible to assert things its authors never intended and in so doing, twist the text. What if you are making it say things it does not say? What if for example, Genesis 1 is not giving a physical description of how God created the cosmos. What if it is making a theological statement to the people of Israel sitting in Babylon in exile, warning them not to fall into idolatry and worship the gods of Babylon.
What if the original author of Genesis 1 is saying, “Look, people of Israel, all these things the Babylonians worship, sun, moon and stars, etc. Yahweh created. They are just things, just part of God’s creation. They are not divinities. There is only one God, the God of Israel so remain true to this God.”
If that is what Genesis 1, as an example, is really about, the entire creationist edifice collapses. If we come along 2500 years later and demand the text say something it is not saying, who is really doing damage to biblical authority? Surely it is not the findings of modern science. Modern science at its best can only tell us how the universe works, not why it exists. But our biblical traditions do tell us why and they tell us a great deal about who God is and what God is up to.
It seems to me the oddest of oddities that creation scientists in supposedly upholding the Bible are actually doing damage to it, its message, and our ability to make sense to modern people who have been shaped in their understanding of how the universe works by the magnificent findings of modern science.
I suspect you will have a great deal of trouble with what I have written, and that grieves me. But the discussion really stops here. All of the other stuff is just so much stuff intended to support the initial assumption you stated and I quoted above.
pax veritas
Mike
Jonathan,
Thank you for your reply. I am glad that you are at least beginning to question presuppositions even if they are only mine at the moment. I think it is very important in searching for the truth to question presuppositions and test to see if they are at all reasonable in light of the facts. I say facts not conclusions because everyone comes to a conclusion based on there presuppositions not on the facts alone.
I wonder if everyone else in Noah’s time thought as you did, that Noah’s preaching of the flood to come was doing damage to belief in God too. At that time no one had seen rain let alone enough to constitute a world wide flood necessitating an enormous boat to survive. This sounded like complete nonsense to all who heard it which is why only Noah and his family got on the boat when it was time. If you are wrong about the bible being wrong then you are actually doing more damage to God’s kingdom by going along with man’s ideas rather then God’s truth.
1Corinthians 1:20-22; 25-27 “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe… Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong.”
Your assessment of my presuppositions is your own assumption. I have come to that conclusion through my studies, yes, but I did not look at the facts stated above because I presupposed a young earth. The facts stated above are facts despite my presuppositions. My conclusions based on those facts are the only things you can tie my presuppositions to. Since we have only met briefly at Jonathan’s wedding, (I was the videographer) let me tell you a little about myself. I was atheistic or agnostic most of my life, all the way through college. The only way I became a Christian was by changing my presuppositions to allow for the possibility that my presuppositions might be wrong. So no longer was my presupposition that religion was stupid and science had proven away God, but rather that there was a possibility that those presuppositions were wrong. I was still highly doubtful that they were but I was willing to put them to the test. Only in doing that was I able to see the evidence for God, the bible, and Jesus, and then become saved. Only my searching didn’t stop there. I believed in Jesus and the bible but I didn’t know the bible well enough to know how my beliefs about the age of the earth contradicted the bible, God, and Jesus in whom I believed. I’m not saying I have all the answers but God has given me many answers to my many questions. Each time someone presents a point against my presuppositions I have had to consider not only their presuppositions but their evidence against my own presuppositions and consider the possibility that my presuppositions might be wrong in some way.
I find it simply amazing how easily you seem to dismiss all the facts that I presented in my earlier post as pointless. How then do you account for the fact that pottery was found in coal, or a hammer head found in an old rock, or the soft tissue and blood cells found in dinosaur bones, or the fact that the continents have not completely eroded yet, or the extremely erroneous dates of things we know the ages of, or why we find carbon14 in diamonds, or why there isn’t enough salt in the oceans? You did not address a single one of these problems with old earth dating, instead you simply wave them off because you say they are some how based on my own presuppositions. None of these facts have anything to do with my presuppositions. They may have something to do with those who found them, because it’s hard to find something unless you believe it’s possible. It took Edison over 2,000 tries to make the light bulb. He never would have been able to make one unless he believed it was possible to do. That was his presupposition.
Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation that accounts for the evidence is usually the correct explanation. If you look up the articles on the soft tissue and blood cells of the dinosaurs you will see that they were found by secular scientist not creationists. They are all trying to come up with explanations as to how these things were “preserved” millions of years rather then considering the possibility that I am suggesting, that they have not been in the ground for millions of years but instead, only thousands or less. It is not creationists who found out that soft tissue doesn’t last for more then a few thousand years, it is secular scientists. The reason I can suggest the bones have not been around millions of years comes from my presupposition that we may not be living on an earth millions of years old and that dinosaurs may not have died off millions of years ago and I believe there is good evidence to support this conclusion, but that is another topic for another day. I have only come to this conclusion from studying the other side from where my views and presuppositions were. It would be so much easier for me to jump on the bandwagon and believe in millions of years and side with the progressive creationists or the gap theory or that God some how used evolution to bring forth his creation. None of these ideas are consistent with the bible, yet the bible is completely consistent with itself despite the fact that it was written over 2500 years, by 37 different authors, made up of 66 different books, and the backgrounds of the writers range from kings to fishermen, from lawyers to shepherds, from doctors to prophets, from the rich and to the poor. The fact that these books fit so perfectly together is a feat all to itself. I am not interested in popularity or ease; I am interested only in the truth. There are too many problems with an old earth scientifically and biblically that I must side with the young earth believers.
Here are a couple more scientific things to consider that I hope you won’t simply dismiss with out any research. The earth’s rotation is slowing down which means it was spinning faster in the past. This causes major problems for anything living a few 100 million of years ago. Also the moon is moving farther away which means it was closer in the past. This also causes major problems in the past. How about the fact that helium atoms are created in the radioactive decay process. We know the rate at which helium is coming into the atmosphere. We also know the rate at which helium is leaving our atmosphere and there is simply not enough helium in the atmosphere to account for the millions, let alone billions of years of radioactive decay. All of these facts seem to point to a younger earth rather then what is currently believed by secular scientists today. All of the facts I have presented are serious issues for the old earth believing scientists and I am just scraping the surface. Many old earth proponents simply ignore these problems and pretend they don’t exist. Some have tried to address these issues with out much success. Some responded to the helium issue by saying it just escapes into space but the problem is that we know how much escapes into space and it is very little. Some have suggested that the pot in coal and hammer head in the old rock are evidence that aliens were here millions of years ago. You are welcome to believe the alien theory but I find the bible much more reliable.
Dating is not down to a science yet. I only listed a small number of the erroneous dates of things we know the dates of, there are many more I could list. Scientists who do the dating know how wide ranging the dates can be and are fully aware of the selectiveness of dating. What blows my mind is that they still do it and call it scientific. I’m sorry but selecting a date based on your presuppositions is not science. If you look at the worlds perspective on things and compare it to the bibles perspective they are generally complete opposites. The world says get revenge while in the bible God says revenge is mine. The world says hate your enemies, while the bible says love your enemies and pray for them. The world says man knows best, while the bible says God knows all. The world says humans are naturally good, while the bible says men are naturally evil. The world says trust your heart, while the bible says you can’t trust your heart.
Mark 7:20-23 NAS And He was saying, “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.”
The bible says God created everything in 7 days the world says it took 13.7 billion years. The bible says that the order of creation was, water, light/dark, sky between the waters, land and seas and vegetation, stars and sun and moon, water dwelling creatures and the flying creatures, land dwelling creatures and finally man kind. The world says the order was light, stars, land, sky, water, micro organisms, plants, sea creatures, amphibians, land creatures, dinosaurs, birds, whales, man kind. The world says death and destruction before man, but the bible says death came because of the sin of the first man, Adam. The bible says God destroyed everything with a global flood, the world says it was only a local flood. Scripture clearly doesn’t fit with a local flood. There is a lot of evidence for a global flood that you may not even be aware of. But that is another topic for another day.
You said that I presupposed that the bible is right which leads me to conclude that you believe the bible is wrong. You said that you are grieved by my views but I think your view is the weaker view because you have thrown out your entire foundation for any Christian beliefs when you say the bible isn’t true. That is unless you are simply an unbeliever. How much of the bible is wrong? Just the first chapter of Genesis? The first 3 chapters of Genesis? Everything through to Abraham? The whole book of Genesis? Multiple books of the bible? The whole Old Testament? The whole Bible? Do you just pick and choose which parts you want to believe and which parts you don’t? How much of the bible is wrong in your mind? How can you possibly be logically consistent if you hold to a Christian view and think any of those are wrong? They are so tightly knit together that if you unravel even one the whole thing comes undone. I am not saying a single error in the bible undoes the whole bible but the areas I have questioned you about are pretty major areas that are important to the entire gospel. I wrote a whole bunch more about the problems with that view and it’s inconsistencies but I will stop here as I have already said quite a bit. If you would like to get into that further I’d be more then happy to show you why I have made these claims against your view of the bible.
I hope you don’t feel that I am attacking you personally, because I am just trying to address some of the weaknesses of your thinking. I have nothing against you and truly love and care about you and your understanding of the truth. Like I said before I don’t have all the answers but God has blown my mind with the answers He has given to me. What good is it if I have understanding and do not share it with others? If I am wrong I would hope that others would help me to see the truth better too.
God bless,
Jason
Jason,
I am only sending you this reply because I consider you a friend. If you were anyone else I would not give you the time of day.
It is simply impossible for you to understand our responses because you have been so brainwashed by this so called “scientific” evidence that you have no way to distinguish between real science and your pseudoscience. In my original post, I had looked into much of the evidence you raised in your first response and in fact your original comments only made my original statement on carbon dating stronger. The sources you cite have nothing scientific about them. They take a large set of data, pick and choose the relatively few data points that fit their agenda and ignore the rest. Let me be very clear, THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. If science did this we would have none of the technologies we take for granted today. Science seeks to create a description of the world that is systematically verifiable through statistical averaging and standard deviations. There are always data points that lie outside the vast majority of data that behaves in a certain trend, but the important part is that a majority of the data behaves a certain way. Sometimes there are reasons we can explain the outliers and sometimes there are not, but just because there are some points that don’t fit doesn’t mean that we ignore the majority of the data.
Your arguments simply wreak of naivety about science and what it really is. The very fact that you raise the arguments you do makes you look like a fool. The “facts” you provide do nothing to support your argument. All you do is raise questions, but you have not systematically proven anything. Even the “scientific” papers you refer to wreak of the same pseudoscience, which only proves my original posting to be quite valid. In addition, they are written on a silly little journal devoted solely to the creationist agenda and that is not refereed.
There is really nothing to discuss here. Until you open your mind to how science actually works rather than how you have been lead to believe it works, there is no way for us to have a conversation. I would like to help you better understand the truth and this is my how I am helping you. As I said in my original post, it is simply a waste of my time. I would suggest that you get a very basic book on science, how it works, the scientific method and begin to change your viewpoint (as an outsider) that science is somehow fundamentally flawed. Try A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Method by Carey. That should give you a foundation. Pay special attention to the pseudoscience sections as this is the core issue that prevents us from being able to have a discussion in the first place. If you move onto other books, make sure that they are well educated people that actually have a PhD, teach at a major university, publish in refereed journals and are well respected in their field.
I cannot continue any further discussion with you. It is not my job to teach you how to do science. I spent 12 years getting my education. I can’t teach it to you in my spare time. Good luck.
Jonathan
Jason
Again, lots of words, little that is helpful. I will not engage most of what you said. But one issue i will address. I do not think the Bible is wrong. I think your assumptions about what the Bible says are wrong. Those are entirely two different perspectives. I don’t think you are really too open to what i mean by that and I have no need to try to convince you otherwise. I do believe truth prevails even if our understanding of it is partial and incomplete.