I didn’t type this as a you’re-wrong-I’m-right kind of post. Just respectfully agreeing with your overall premise that we can be committed Bible believing Christians and disagree on things about what the details in Genesis 1 and 2 say.
I don’t see where anything in your post contradicts a thing I posted.
Well arguing about details vs arguing about plain text is indeed two different things. If you ignore plain text to allow for details you have already chosen to walk down the wrong road.
I tell my wife all the time to spend her thoughts on how good things can happen not how bad things can happen. It applys to this issue. If you ignore that God built this all in 6 days, you spend countless hours studying things that sre not trying to find how they could be. Wouldn’t it be far more productive studying how things that are could be?
I as a Bibilical creationist see the pre Cambrian evolutionary theory as a silly filing error. Noah’s event piled up so many tiny fossils of a type in one spot so that they were impossible to ignore’ so we discovered them.
It was also obvious that in nature so many of one type of life form in one spot would have exhausted the local ecology to limit the reproduction rate to make such teeming masses impossible. Kinda obvious that some event gathered them. But we did not discover that. Even when bird fossils were found gathered inside the snail piles.
There is none so blind as those who refuse to see’ and none so find who insist on searching in the wrong place.
A point my wife trys to make for me...
I’m with you. As a computer programmer, I can see God reusing DNA “code” to genetically engineer new species that, while bearing some resemblance to prior species, is not related by descendancy. That is why you get an infinite number of “from a common ancestor” species but no proven direct ancestries, not even recent ones. The evolutionary tree is all leaves and no trunk or branches.
God was never in a hurry.
Psalm 90:4 For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
2 Peter 3:8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
I am also very much a an old earth creationist.
I find it baffling that people exclude the possibility of the existence of humanity throughout prehistoric earth based on the lack of fossil evidence. Just because we don’t see a thing doesn’t mean the thing did not exist. We know, for example, of the existence of the Denisovan based on one bone and distinct DNA markers in their modern human descendants. Without that one bone, the Denisovan never existed in the eyes of modern science.
To buttress that argument I found the following: T. rex is one of the best represented extinct dinosaurs, with more than 20 fossil individuals identified.
Twenty, out of how many thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout the Cretaceous? And these are non-sentient creatures without end of life ceremonies that might have obliterated the remains. These creatures lived in specific habitats where the remains were preserved.
I think we (humans) have been here a very long time indeed. We have known our cousins and watched them fade and disappear. (Denisovan, Neanderthal, etc...) and likely had names for them that would translate out as dwarf, gnome, elf, etc...
Too often it is assumed that our ancestors were stupid and brutish. Some think they must have been animals. I think they were us minus the technology. Our very rich mythology and shared fiction teaches us of dragons and other fantastic creatures in ways that are almost culturally universal. We have, I believe, witnessed much more of the earth’s history than we are given credit.
As stated above, I’m also an old-earth creationist.