"unorthodox" Creation views

[Lotrfreak323]

Does anyone else feel like it's taboo to speak of anything other than YEC, when in church? Maybe it's just the area where I live... at least I hope so.
To make even more fun we're watching AiG videos in my sunday school class, and I don't know whether I should shoot through it's fallacious reasoning in the discussion, or just sit down and shut up.

[JAYMZ]

From my time here on tweb, this is the one issue I see atheists use, trying to divide christians with. ( and in some cases, succeeding )

Ask some questions with it, maybe it might make someone step up their game in defending YEC.

[Lotrfreak323]

Maybe I should... next week we're watching a video on how evolution inevitably leads to racism.....

[CodewordConduit]

• Edited by a Moderator •

Moderated By: T-Shirt Ninja

Nontheists aren't allowed to post in this forum

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publically complain or whine, please take it to the Psychotherapy Room unless told otherwise.

[Lotrfreak323]

• Edited by a Moderator •

[Vigilante]

We should all be dogmatic for the truth. It's only when somebody holds a different idea of truth that people use "dogmatic" as some kind of derogatory description. But I say that almost every person I've encountered with ANTI-YEC beliefs is far more dogmatic than any YEC I've come across.
They are all passionate, but they are ALL dogmatic as well. Why wouldn't you be if you think it's the truth?

[Vigilante]

Also, by the way, in most churches the teaching is not about "what makes you a Christian", as far as origins, but rather, "what does the Bible TEACH". Churches are about teaching the Word, and as such, the Word teaches YEC to most people who read it, and thus, a lot of churches "teach the Word" which comes out as YEC. God created the world, he created the stars and people, 6 days, 7th rest, in a Garden, take care of the earth, Satan comes, eat the fruit, sin and death enter humanity, etc.... This is strait from the Bible, and churches are about teaching the Bible, and so classrooms sound YECish.

The problem is people are trying to take focus away from teaching what God's Word SAYS, and focusing on "being a good Christian" while not paying much attention on what the Word says. Especially Genesis. We'll just take parts of the Bible we like to make good Christians, but we'll use the corrupt thinking of fallen, godless men to tell us what the truth is in nature and history. I think not.

If you want to have fights about what makes a person Christian, I would think a pretty big tenant is believing scripture is His inspired revelation to man, in other words, it's TRUE. Even Genesis. If you can't believe what God did in Genesis because Darwin pondered birds, then why believe what God did in MML&J when Dawkins ponders humanity and the irreversibility of death?

You guys talk like teaching YEC in a church is some kind of evil, when in fact, they are just teaching Scripture as best they can. Dawkins and Darwin and Dennet and Harris are not Scripture, and they are not infallible, and they are not 100% accurate, and they are not much of anything. They are fallen humans with corrupt thinking, and they need God as much as anybody else to know the truth of history.

[Philosophickle]

We should all be dogmatic for the truth. It's only when somebody holds a different idea of truth that people use "dogmatic" as some kind of derogatory description. But I say that almost every person I've encountered with ANTI-YEC beliefs is far more dogmatic than any YEC I've come across.
They are all passionate, but they are ALL dogmatic as well. Why wouldn't you be if you think it's the truth?

Because not all truth is worth being dogmatic about. There are trivial truths and there are very complex issues (like evolutionary theory), and to simply make broad pronouncements of your opponents whom you may have everything else in common is arrogant and foolish.

[Philosophickle]

You guys talk like teaching YEC in a church is some kind of evil, when in fact, they are just teaching Scripture as best they can. Dawkins and Darwin and Dennet and Harris are not Scripture, and they are not infallible, and they are not 100% accurate, and they are not much of anything. They are fallen humans with corrupt thinking, and they need God as much as anybody else to know the truth of history.

What does that have to do with anything?

[Lotrfreak323]

Also, by the way, in most churches the teaching is not about "what makes you a Christian", as far as origins, but rather, "what does the Bible TEACH". Churches are about teaching the Word, and as such, the Word teaches YEC to most people who read it, and thus, a lot of churches "teach the Word" which comes out as YEC. God created the world, he created the stars and people, 6 days, 7th rest, in a Garden, take care of the earth, Satan comes, eat the fruit, sin and death enter humanity, etc.... This is strait from the Bible, and churches are about teaching the Bible, and so classrooms sound YECish.

The problem is people are trying to take focus away from teaching what God's Word SAYS, and focusing on "being a good Christian" while not paying much attention on what the Word says. Especially Genesis. We'll just take parts of the Bible we like to make good Christians, but we'll use the corrupt thinking of fallen, godless men to tell us what the truth is in nature and history. I think not.

If you want to have fights about what makes a person Christian, I would think a pretty big tenant is believing scripture is His inspired revelation to man, in other words, it's TRUE. Even Genesis. If you can't believe what God did in Genesis because Darwin pondered birds, then why believe what God did in MML&J when Dawkins ponders humanity and the irreversibility of death?

You guys talk like teaching YEC in a church is some kind of evil, when in fact, they are just teaching Scripture as best they can. Dawkins and Darwin and Dennet and Harris are not Scripture, and they are not infallible, and they are not 100% accurate, and they are not much of anything. They are fallen humans with corrupt thinking, and they need God as much as anybody else to know the truth of history.

I do not teach teaching YEC itself is bad, but rather forcing it down people's throats as the only acceptable view is wrong, because once those people realize the earth isn't 10,000 years old, they'll inevitably leave the church. Not to mention, if Genesis 1 was meant to be literal, then the evidence would be alot different.

[Eeset-Shadowgrl]

Does anyone else feel like it's taboo to speak of anything other than YEC, when in church? Maybe it's just the area where I live... at least I hope so.
To make even more fun we're watching AiG videos in my sunday school class, and I don't know whether I should shoot through it's fallacious reasoning in the discussion, or just sit down and shut up.

Patience is the other side of wisdom. I have learned that sitting down and shutting up is often the wisest course of action when faced with dogma. The age of the cosmos is whatever it is and to argue over whether a 24 hour day could be the correct interpretation of Genesis accomplishes little except to back people into their respective corners. I don't see where it was ever important enough for Jesus to even comment on it. When such subjects come up I wait patiently for the topic to change to something of importance.

[Vigilante]

Because not all truth is worth being dogmatic about. There are trivial truths and there are very complex issues (like evolutionary theory), and to simply make broad pronouncements of your opponents whom you may have everything else in common is arrogant and foolish.

True, but I would think Biblical truths are not that trivial. Especially when the two major "interpretations" of Genesis are "it's right as written, God did everything" or "none of it is accurate as written, God didn't really do anything."

[franktalk]

Actually this is a tough subject. As I see it both the science camp and the YEC are in the same boat. Science has set the rules of the game and the YEC are using those rules to show that science is wrong in their interpretation. Both groups using the same rules is the issue. Take for instance uniformitarianism. It is an assumption of both science and YEC. But we have no evidence that that assumption is correct. From a Biblical viewpoint we have 2Peter which tells us that people who believe in uniformitarianism are fools. So for me I have cast off the set of rules and am open to many views of the past, even one in which the past is not linear at all. Now once you make this leap then all of the data gathered by science over time can and should be viewed with a more open interpretation.

I happen to like to study anomalies. Because I think this is where we find if a theory has any merit or is it just a consensus built on a show of hands. Maybe a couple of examples would be in order now.

Take evolution, yes, we can show evolution in bacteria. But that evolution requires a 99.9% death rate (actually more). Like when we try and cure malaria we can inject something into a person that kills off normal malaria. But we find that some of them have mutated and are immune to our treatment. But that infected person had a billion malaria in them. Now we take this data and overlay it on higher order creatures. If we do then we find that we would need the same 99.99999% death rate in order for evolution to progress. But we are told that we came from apes over millions of years. And why is it that the numbers can be ignored when we make that statement? Because we are here so it must be true. There is a growing number of people who are seeing these numbers and will one day be crushed just like all those who came before them who disagreed. For you see that it is not facts that get to rise to the top of the heap but the majority opinion.

Take the age of the earth. If one studies soil erosion you would find that all of the continents are young. How would we know? Because they all would have flowed into the sea long ago at current erosion rates.

So what does this mean. Nothing really. I bring this up not to show that YEC is correct but to show that our data set has holes in it. And if it does have holes then why do we trust it? I for one do not trust it at all when it comes to things we can not observe or reproduce. So projections into the past mean little to me. The whole debate over the age of the earth means little when we accept that we may have a nonlinear past. Now since I believe in scripture I assume that miracles happened which can explain all kinds of anomalies. Exactly how I don't have a clue. I just accept that the jumbled mess left over from the Fall and the Flood makes things way hard to interpret.

Science does not give us answers or causes. It gives us observations and theories. No one in science can tell you why the underlaying foundation of the universe is the way it is. Why does a proton have a certain mass or charge? Not a clue. So the foundations of science rest on vapor. It is man who assumes that it rest on solid ground or one day will be able to answer those tough questions. But that is faith. Faith that one day man will find out. But faith can see through the vapor and see the root cause of the universe to be outside of this universe. So we all have faith. We just choose what to have faith in. The unseen forces in a spirit world, or faith in man. Since man did not make man, and man did not make the universe then I will hang my faith hat on the spirit world.

[Vigilante]

Take the age of the earth. If one studies soil erosion you would find that all of the continents are young. How would we know? Because they all would have flowed into the sea long ago at current erosion rates.

Except that you don't hold to uniformitarianism, remember? So when you say "current erosion rates", therein lies the problem. Because they assume what we see today, always was in the past. And as you know, we don't have to hold to such a presupposition. So even with the age of the continents, who knows?

[franktalk]

Except that you don't hold to uniformitarianism, remember? So when you say "current erosion rates", therein lies the problem. Because they assume what we see today, always was in the past. And as you know, we don't have to hold to such a presupposition. So even with the age of the continents, who knows?

Congratulations, you see the difficulty in forming a past without uniformitarianism. So my statement about soil erosion is completely a theory and not fact. But there is something I left out in my first post. That the world is being held as it is until it is time to be destroyed by fire. So from the time of the flood until today (in general) the world is bing held without supernatural change, and one could make the argument that it is being protected as well from natural or man made changes that would upset a balance determined by God. This too is in 2Peter.

Now that I have admitted using uniformitarianism let me state for the record I was projecting it into the future not the past. But I used the projection to object to the classic age of the continents. You see that using current erosion rates North America would erode down to sea level in around 10.5 million years. This is assumed going forward with erosion and mountain building at their current rates. But as we apply uniformitarianism backwards we run into problems with other conclusions of science. Like the age of the rock and soil of North America. So if we use uniformitarianism to date the rock and soil yet also use it on soil erosion we end up with an impossible situation. Like the age of the rock in the midwest is dated around 50 mil to 85 mil years old. This was an ancient seafloor that was pushed up. That seafloor was pushed up according to science so long ago that it should all be gone today using erosion numbers. Now when I see two sets of numbers that don't agree I assume that the numbers are wrong or something else is going on that I am not aware of. In this case a nonlinear past affecting atomic decay, or a flood that rearranged rock and soil, and even a complete redo of the universe after the fall. Who is to say how supernatural events changed things on the earth? But one of the signs would be inconsistent projections into the past when the events occurred. And of course this is what we have today. Why is it that the age of rock is determined by fossils or atomic dating? Could it be that the age of the earth needs to be old so evolution had a chance to work? Could we hide slow change that we can't even measure today if the age was 10 million instead of 4.5 billion? No we could not. This is why Charles Lyell and Darwin wanted an old earth. They needed it to hide the past. For if the events happened in a catastrophic manner then their theories would fall apart. Only now after 150 years of pushing back has geology accepted some catastrophic events. Bretz flood and Mount St Helen supplied too much data for them to ignore catastrophic events. Had they continued they would have been exposed as the dogma driven group that they are. Most people can see big giant scars on the landscape so the uniformitarians were forced to accept some catastrophic events. The Darwinist can still hide behind atomic dating until someone finds out a way to disprove it. Oh, like soil erosion.

But for me I don't have a horse in this race. I could care less. I study these things not to prove an age but to show that accepted dates may be way off. We humans think too highly of ourselves.