Posted on 01/03/2014 10:54:01 AM PST by fwdude
Genesis 1:28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it…”
How long have people been living on the Earth? The evolutionist says two million years. The Bible-believing Christian says about six thousand. Who is right?
Statistically, a couple must have 2.1 children to keep a population at the same level. In practice, this means a minimum of three children per family. Let us suppose for a moment that the biblical account of the Genesis Flood in which just eight people survived is true. Let us further suppose that each family from this population point in history had 2.4 children on average. This very modest number will take into account all the deaths through infant mortality, plagues and war. How long would it take to reach today’s world population? Surprisingly, the answer is just less than five thousand years. This figure fits nicely into known historical records.
Now suppose we take the evolutionary view that mankind has been on this planet for two million years and we begin with two people – or eight, it will make little difference – and they also had the statistical 2.4 children per family. We will finish up with a number so impossibly large that the universe itself would not hold them! Aware of this problem, the textbooks explain it away by speaking of “population stability throughout this time.” This is nothing short of an appeal to a miracle! Frankly, the biblical account is far more believable.
Prayer: Jesus, it was through You that all things, including us, were made. When we withdrew our love from God and cut ourselves off from Him through sin, You came to our rescue. How can I ever thank You enough? Amen.
Notes: Cleone H. Weigand. “Morality Remains the Best Way to Stem Population Growth.” Milwaukee Journal, April 14, 1985.
Do I have to believe the incorrect one also?
One of your genealogies has you as the son of William. Another has you as the son of Mildred. Are they false because they are not "the same?"
Of course there’s an element of faith in creation. The earth was created with an apparent age, just as Adam was. The question becomes, who should we love, fear, believe and obey? Do we call God a liar, or men?
The language used in Genesis 1 precludes long ages. It’s impossible to have an “evening and a morning,” (literally dusk and dawn), describing such long ages, or the earth would have to be revolving once every billion years or so. And whenever an ordinal number (first, second, etc.) is used with “yom” it always means a 24 hour day.
But beyond that, there’s the stupendous complexity of the most “simple” one-celled life. It’s laughably ridiculous to believe that a single protein molecule could form spontaneously. This idea, by itself, has been declared as likely as a solar system full of blind men all simultaneously solving the Rubik’s Cube. And the most “simple” one-celled life contains dozens of them. And that’s not counting a variably permeable cell membrane, DNA, etc. Having a whole “simple” one-celled life form spontaneously appear has been compared to believing that a tornado tearing through a junkyard could create a fully functional 747. Darwin had the excuse that at that time cells were thought to be just blobs of protoplasm. “Scientists” today don’t have that excuse.
Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation a long time ago, instead devising the law of biogenesis, that life begets life, but “scientists” must cling to this fiction of spontaneous generation or face up to the prospect of God and His rules that they refuse to obey.
See “Pascal’s Wager”.
You have infinite gain and infinite loss with minor cost
vs
No eternal gain or no eternal loss with minor gain.
Where do you want to place your “chip”? You have only one.
There’s a big part of Pascal’s Wager that never gets discussed, if you’re believing in God just to play the odds then you’re also betting God’s OK with you just covering bets and not really believing. The reality is either you believe or you don’t, believing just to cover bases is actually not believing it’s pretending.
Faith is involved, but Pascal is also pointing out that it’s actually more REASONABLE to believe in God.
More like 250 million, truth be told, but the point is made.
“Evolutionists must assume, with no evidence or basis, that these innumerable “resets” must have happened to make their model fit the math.”
Not true; that they “must” assume anything of the kind.
It might fit nice with the math needed for a “stable” population beginning at a rigged point in time, but human history never cared to bend itself to that math so it is irrelevant.
They - “evolutionsists - can also “assume” that due to basic human mortality in a much more hostile natural environment that NOT everyone individual formed a couple with someone else and NOT every couple (on average) had 2.4 children. Could that assumption be wrong? Yes. Just as creationists can be wrong to assume that every human since Noah did form a human couple and every couple (on average) did have 2.4 children.
Making history conform to a mathematical formula that uses unproven postulates does not prove the formula is an expression of actual history. It only proves that the formula conforms to the unproven assumptions that went into it.
It’s not just faith, it’s understanding the reality of what it means to believe. If you don’t believe you don’t believe, period. Faking it “just in case” isn’t believing, the REASONABLE then is to be who you are. If you don’t believe and you’re wrong (ie there is God) faking it ain’t getting you into heaven because He knows you don’t actually believe. The Wager also runs into problems in that it’s binary in a very NOT binary world, one doesn’t simply believe in God, you gotta pick a brand, and often sub-brand, and flavor, there’s lots of religions out there many with splinter groups. Presumably they don’t ALL get it right (if only because they all think the others are wrong so it’s not logically possible for them to all be right), at least some of them aren’t going to heaven, and if you pick wrong you might as well have not believed for all the good it did you.
I love Pascal’s Wager. As for settling the arguments between creationists and evolutionists, that won’t be possible until somebody invents a time machine. I don’t really care. It’s enough just to be thankful we have the Bible, and the Jews. They have brought amazing blessings upon humanity, as God said they would. Humanity is a nasty, crawling mess of filth, and the Bible has given us a semblance of order and goodness.
As far as “which brand”, I’ll leave that reasoned discussion to CS Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”.
The Christian God is the only one that makes sense.
re: time machine
Yep, I thought about that recently. These arguments about origins, age of the earth, how it all was created, etc,
cannot be settled by science, which works in the here and now,
and doesn’t have a time machine.
Sorry but you’re wrong. You can slide Pascal’s Wager into any belief and the math remains the same. It adds up to Christian God for YOU because that’s what you already believe in. If you were Jewish that’s what it would add up to. If you were Hindu it would go there. And as an atheist I see that it doesn’t actually add up at all which makes it add up to atheism.
In the end all Pascal’s Wager really proves gross over simplifications are gross.
I said you’d have to go beyond PW to get to the Christian God with the further reasoning of CS Lewis.
You’re being unnecessarily contentious.
No I’m not. I’m pointing out the problems with Pascal’s Wager. By having to bring in extra stuff from CS Lewis you’re admitting that Pascal’s Wager has issues. So we’re in agreement, PW is false. All done.
Thanks for the “pigeon chess”...
Now looks who’s being unnecessarily contentious.
“The average is 2.45 when I checked just now, so your 2.4 factor is in error”
You post an answer with three significant digits, the article used two.
If the source data were calculated to four or more significant digits, would that not make YOUR factor in error also?
If you consider ONLY the countries of Africa (presumably most like the conditions experience by mankind for most of our (evolutionary) existence, the average is 4.475909091
If you only include sub-Saharan Africa, the number is 4.675
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
No, no, you won! you won!
Like you said, “done!”
bbbrrrbbbb....bbbrrrbbb....
Sad sad sad. It was a nice talk, then you couldn’t take where it went, now you’re just throwing insults. Typical, but sad.
If the universe is seen in terms of General Relativity, one can, through visualizing the ‘slowing’ of time given that system’s mass, actually construct a table that should seem logical to ‘old’ and ‘young’ advocates alike.
But such a view too, would have a young earth creationist subscribing to General Relativity. Is that possible?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.