Posted on 03/26/2009 7:20:22 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
‘But the New Testament does not make a big deal out of the Age of the Earth…’
by Peter Milford
...
The issue of the age of the earth parallels circumcision. In my experience, the first response from Christians who do not accept the age of the earth that the Scriptures indicate, is to say something like “The New Testament does not make a big deal out of the age of the earth” or “It is not the purpose of the Bible to give the age of the earth”. Their point is that (1) the issue of the age of the earth is a non-essential, and (2) therefore not something we should argue about. They believe we are free to hold whatever view our conscience permits. They are right in the first part. In and of itself, the age of the earth is not a central focus of Scripture. But the distortions a long-age view brings to the gospel message make them wrong on the second part...
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
Would that you were running our Treasury Department.
I may not agree with all you say here,but at least
you have a coherent thought process!
Were you there?
“Except all of the observational evidence to the contrary, of course!
Were you there?”
Your question astounds me. Were you there when the Magna Carta was written? If not, how do you know that it was? Honestly, you really didn’t mean to ask that question, did you?
Yes I did.
Were you there to witness the creation?
If not then you did not observe it.
There may be some "circumstantial" evidence that could be utilized to support a different version of creation than the one recorded in Genesis, but there is no "observational" evidence. None. You were not there. I was not there. No one observed it, except God.
So I will again ask the simple question (the same question God asked Job in chapter 38):
Were you there?
Were you there when the Magna Carta was written?
No.
If not, how do you know that it was?
There is a record from the people who were there. Just as we have a record of the persons who were present at the creation. You choose to reject the eyewitness testimony of God in favor of the circumstantial evidence from people who were not.
The assumption of those who do not believe in a young earth is that observable processes of change (radiometric decay, the expansion of the universe) have been going on in the same way since they began.
Now I'll admit that is an assumption, but it is an assumption that is challenged by no observable data whatsoever. For one among scores of possible examples, there is no known case of argon-40 reconstituting itself into potassium-40.
Those who believe in a young earth can counter this by:
- Asserting that every single one of these process measurements is a lie, deliberately propounded by a scientific establishment which has maintained the lies over two centuries in a deliberate attempt to destroy Christianity, or
- Asserting that God deliberately created the universe with countless evidences of great age as a test of faith, intending that believers discard it all and replace it with the genealogical tables of the Old Testament.
I find neither of those assertions necessary to my belief.
The parallel to the Magna Carta doesn’t work. “Were you there?” is a perfect question. The only one present would have been the creator Himself, and He has left a record. One believes the record or one doesn’t.
In THAT record, the story says that the creation of heaven and earth was part of creation week.
That story could only be told by one Person. (note the capital “P”.)
Me neither.
How long did it take Jesus to turn water into fine vintage wine?
Neither evolution nor any other science make any statement whatsoever about creation; Creationists continue to spread their belief through the incessant repetition that it does.
Were you there to witness the New York Mets World Series victory in 1931? No? Then how do you know that it didn’t happen?
Strengthen your faith. God would be pleased.
“Were you there?”
Yes he was, xzins told me. In fact, I have it on good authority that PM suggested that Eve might be a good playmate, ah, helpmate, for Adam, so we can blame him for all that originates from that suggestion.
Actually, the Bible is allegorical. And the record establishes conclusively that the earth is very old.
“That story could only be told by one Person. (note the capital “P”.)”
Regarding the capital “P”, I have occasionally wondered how German writers express the same reverence when using nouns that refer to God, since all nouns are capitalized in German. Can you shed some light on that?
Again you refuse to actually dialog. I never said that man was NOT a special creation. Further, I myself brought up the creation of man and woman as a point that there IS an element of story-telling to the creation narrative of Genesis.
(The creation-story appears again, right there in Genesis wherein God creates man and woman at the same time in that account.) Do you mean to say then that, because things SHOULD be read literally, always, that BOTH accounts are factually true down to minuta even though on the literal side they contradict each other? I am a programmer, in logical-thinking contradictions mean something is wrong, usually an assumption. Therefore, because there is a contradiction here under the assumption that both stories are literal-narrative/scientific-documentary style language, that may be the false assumption. There is no problem if these stories are being presented in a more story-telling fashion, that is the second account is merely a refresher/prolog to the story that is being told there, namely the fall of man.
You smugly throw out Paul's verse condemning the wise as foolish (Cor.) when it is manifestly obvious that I was not calling your stance foolish, but rather your inability to dialog & communicate... in other words, even though I apologized for it I was not calling your beliefs foolish but your actions; you.
Again and again you dance away from dialog, reason, and analysis instead imagining non-existent attacks and an arrogance exceeded only by congress... and taking a rebuke in completely the wrong way, even after I explained it.
Answer this: How can there be a meaningful conversation when you have already condemned me? How can I present a defense of my views when you refuse to listen?
Zacheeus asked Jesus "How can a man be born again? Can he enter his mother's womb a second time?" This was a perfectly valid question to a very literal taking of Jesus's own words. But is that what Jesus was talking about?
Of course. Thanks for asking. Reverence is expressed in English because we don’t capitalize every noun. Germans do so with the language itself. “Denn also hat Gott die Welt geliebt...”
There is some level of age that will be expressed in any miracle. As Marlowe points out, Jesus created a vintage wine out of water. Vintage wine, as we know, requires time.
Necessarily the earth had to have soil, and soil is the result of a process. Therefore, there’s some level of age that would have been apparent. Likewise, a fully made human would bypass birth, infancy, adolescence, etc. There would be an apparent age.
Sedimentary layers, however, would be a different subject.
For those areas I rely on the thoughts of my sister, Alamo-girl, and her understanding of a few things things, to include: (1) That Eden was outside of time, and (2) that the point of the big bang, due to relativity and the speed of light, has a different place on the scale of time than does the earth. Time would pass far more on the earth, part of the rapidly expanding universe.
“How can there be a meaningful conversation when you have already condemned me?”
The short answer is that there can’t be. Most of the creationists and YECs on this site believe that one cannot be a Christian if one does not hold to the belief that the Bible is literally true (at least in public!). They have a scorecard (OK, perhaps it’s an allegorical scorecard) that they use to assess the Christianity of those who take positions such as yours (or mine). If the boxes don’t get checked, then you’re not a Christian, and hence condemned.
As a Christian myself, I find it hard to accept that brand of fascism as a tenet of my faith.
The Mets came into being long after I came upon the earthly scene. For some reason, your point goes over my head. The Mets were created, originated, formed, begun long after 1931. ORGANON, by Aristotle, NVOUM ORGANON, by Francis Bacon. Mortal things have beginnings. Then there is the big guy.
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
Whether it was 4004 BC or millions or billions of years earlier, things are the same. The big guy did it, not some piece of primordial slime with an itch in its left knee.
Now as to the matter of the angels dancing on the head of a pin. Didn't Blaise Pascal put that one to rest centuries ago?
Caddis the Elder
>>“How can there be a meaningful conversation when you have already condemned me?”
>
>The short answer is that there can’t be. [snip]
>If the boxes don’t get checked, then you’re not a Christian, and hence condemned.
*nod* - I see that you understand.
>As a Christian myself, I find it hard to accept that brand of fascism as a tenet of my faith.
The fascism, yes. I notice, though, that there has been no reply to my observation that if time is not uniform (as relativity indicates) and God’s creating [the Heavens] is described by the Hebrew word meaning “stretch” then, considering that the center and the edges of creation would be moving at different speeds and therefore subject to different ‘time elapsments’ then how can the term day be literal? That is, if the universe is experiencing different times at different locations, how is one literal time-dependent descriptive word adequate?
So much of this reminds me of the Sunni’s and the Shiite's.
You really have to stop making sense—we’ll have none of that here!
Don’t expect a meaningful reply to your posts. Nor should you expect to “win” any arguments. The fact is that science and true Christianity are perfectly compatible, and that is the majority view among all faiths. It is but a small minority of Christians who refuse to use their God-given ability to reason.
Now imagine what a middle school science class curriculum would look like if they had their way!
I agree. I find this whole topic asinine. All it does is get Christians worked up over minutiae, and gets the atheists/agnostics riled up over "what idiots all Christians are."
Some people just need to find a hobby.
You called me a fool. I called you nothing.
How can I present a defense of my views when you refuse to listen?
You refused to answer my question. Let me repeat it. It is a simple yes/no question:
If I might ask, have you allegorized the creation story sufficiently in your mind that you believe (based on the evidence of dry bones), that man was not a special creation of God, but that he descended from lower forms of life and ultimately from some simian non-human ancestor?
But is that what Jesus was talking about?
No.
I was not calling your beliefs foolish but your actions; you.
Thank you for the clarification.
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