Revisiting Youth

LOL I actually have Ken Hamm (sp?) on my podcast rotation. People can say what they want about the guy — he is fascinating to listen to and he keeps the discussion honest.

I loved this post, Nathan. The one thing that drives me crazy is when either side tries to play the part of Al Gore and say, “all debate is over. It’s my way or you’re an idiot savant!” I mean, if things of this magnitude were that cut and dried, we would have moved on by now and everyone would just accept it like they do the fact that the earth is round (post 1400’s ).

Anyway, thanks for the post and your honest search.

Pastor Rob
Lead Pastor
Southbrook Church

Oh, I forgot something…your comment on the light from stars that were millions of light years away…

That’s a good point. One argument that might be offered is the teaching of, “apparent age.” I know, I know, but hear me out. That one is used for a lot of things, but it’s still a worthy point. Adam was obviously not placed in the garden as an embryo, or even an infant. He was a man — only 2 seconds old, and yet he appeared at least 30 - 35 (or whatever) old.

Why couldn’t God create mountains with enough carbon at day one to match what suppossedly takes millions of years?

I wish I could remember the study done on volcanic eruptions in Russia that indicated the resulting mounds had to be 45 million years old. The only problem with the 45 million figure was that they were observed being formed only weeks earlier! So, in fact they were only weeks old, not millions of years.

Following that, couldn’t God “light up the universe” even with light ‘already in place’ that looked like it should have taken millions of years to arrive?

Now, here’s the funny part. Yes, God could do all of that…

or Not!

Fun to think about though

Carbon dating is unreliable past ~10,000 years (fact check?), so you use a dating method that is more accurate in dating older fossils.

It’s 60,000 years. There’s your fact check

Then came the argument concerning dating methods. I can hear Ken Ham saying it now. Dating methods are based on assumptions! Well, the dirty little secret was, those assumptions were entirely reasonable. Those assumptions (radiometric decay rates) were based on empirical and observable evidence.

Indeed, we can check our assumptions about these rates many millions of years back- all we have to do is look at supernovae. Even if the Earth, and thus even supernovae millions of lightyears away, are only thousands of years old, radiation from the most distant supernovae must surely be very old. If our assumptions about radioactive decay rates were drastically wrong, radiation from distant supernovae should be uniformly different from radiation emitted by their closer brethren, and defy our understanding of nuclear physics. Yet this isn’t the case; supernova radiation entirely confirms our assumptions.

Of course, that doesn’t even matter, because if constants like the speed of light or radioactive decay were so much higher in the past, we wouldn’t be here. Never mind the disingenuousness of on the one hand stressing the ‘fine-tuning’ of universal constants while on the other claiming drastic shifts in certain of those constants in the past. If the speed of light or radioactive decay were so high long ago, there would be no life on Earth today; the planet would have been burned to an unliveable crisp.

White-hole cosmology is the only possible young-Earth solution that bypasses these problems, but it has problems of its own.

Oh, the other common argument against forms of dating used is the claim of inaccuracy- rather than decay rates having been different, the dating methods are simply unreliable. This argument is backed up with examples of artifacts we know to be relatively young (indeed, even still-living snails) having been dated to millions of years.

But creationists like Kent Hovind completely ignore the reason for this given in the very papers they cite, which is that the shells of these snails and other mollusks absorb carbon dioxide obtained from ancient limestone lining riverbeds they inhabit. This isn’t exactly news to geologists, they can tell when it happens, and they can correct for it.

Nathan,

Sorry to sound like George again, but isn’t the logical thing to do to simply reject your belief in the old book? You seem to be running into the problem of either a) believing that it actually means what it obviously is trying to say, as in the Bible contradicts the popular paradigm, or b) trying desperately to believe in something that was intentionally poorly and deceptively written.

You are obviously not comfortable with the former (running against a popular paradigm when your own doesn’t have enough support), so why do you bother with the latter?

Also, if you are ever in a debate with anyone, it will be very, very easy to level you off in a hurry if whatever platform you currently favor collapses so easily with a couple minor evidential arguments. (Geology is one of those classic subjects where there are multiple poignant examples that blatantly contradict each specific paradigm - i.e. the nearly identical marine sediment separating the terrestrial footprints in multiple layers at the site I have often excavated, the presence of polystrate fossils spanning millions of years of uniformitarian layering, etc).

-Matt

Nathan,

“Let’s kick things off right”.

(For me) the scriptures are ultimate in authority even over the arguments of men. It seems to me that in this post that (for you) the arguments of men are ultimate in authority even over the scriptures!!!

Because your reasoning in this post would lead one to conclude that your argument for an old earth/young earth is rooted not in the authority of the scriptures but in the authority of the arguments of men. And if you want me to kick it off right I would argue your starting point is not kicking it off right. Unless of course it is right that the arguments of men are more athoritative then the Creator. I don’t think you will find Him agreeing with you on this point so neither will I.

Not to point out that this would be logically absurd. If what you and I believe to be is true that there is an infinite/infallible/omniscient Creator and He has revealed truth about Himself, us and creation in the scriptures then whatever arguments that may proceed forth from men are by default in an ultimate sense nothing in comparison. So it would logically follow that if the arguments of men lead to a contradiction to what the scriptures say then it is logically absurd to change our minds to what the scriptures say. It must rather be the scriptures themselves changing our mind as to what the scriptures say. And that is the flaw in your post in my opinion.

So I would argue that you are actually not kicking it off right and that there needs to be a change in starting point. A starting point that honours God as God as opposed to a starting point that puts man above God is where I would prefer to kick it off with.

Now I am not saying that you personally trust the arguments of men over the word of God but I do believe that this post would lead people to do that and I just wanted to point that out. And that if this is your reasoning for your change in position one way or the other that there is a more fundemental issue and that being the issue I have raised.

Take care,

Tim

With only love and concern for the truth. And if the Truth in an ultimate sense proceeds out of and is Christ then love for Himself that died and bled to save sinful souls as you and I. Thus with love for men including yourself and others that read these posts. I am not trying to be a rude or a butthead.

The speed of light has been shown not to be a constant.