Hyper velocity stars like LMC runaways ...

[Teallaura]

Okay, I'm not going to be able to prove diddly here - but it strikes me that you're leaving out an option. The assumption that the appearance of age must be deceptive leaves out a alternate possibility - that the 'appearance' is a misunderstanding of the actual process(es).

That, of course, may not be the case - but to leave it out as a posit frames the argument poorly. It also creates a rather tunnel view on both sides - without acknowledging that hey, maybe, just maybe, all the evidence isn't in (and by both sides I MEAN both sides. Seriously, using Scripture to ascribe something it never specifically addresses - or seems to care about - is really shaky at best).

And for the record, I'm an AoE agnostic - I don't think either side truly knows enough to conclusively date the Earth, the Universe or the average lonely geek.

[rogue06]

Okay, I'm not going to be able to prove diddly here - but it strikes me that you're leaving out an option. The assumption that the appearance of age must be deceptive leaves out a alternate possibility - that the 'appearance' is a misunderstanding of the actual process(es).

That, of course, may not be the case - but to leave it out as a posit frames the argument poorly. It also creates a rather tunnel view on both sides - without acknowledging that hey, maybe, just maybe, all the evidence isn't in (and by both sides I MEAN both sides. Seriously, using Scripture to ascribe something it never specifically addresses - or seems to care about - is really shaky at best).

And for the record, I'm an AoE agnostic - I don't think either side truly knows enough to conclusively date the Earth, the Universe or the average lonely geek.

That would require pretty much not knowing anything about a very wide ranging number of processes. But more importantly, these various dating techniques provide the same consilient answer which would be, to say the very least, incredibly remarkable if we were reading everything completely wrong. Under the scenario that you propose we should be getting wildly different answers.

[Just Passing Through]

I’m back.
Yes, your point was one that I meant to make, but it got lost in the discussion. I’m not saying that God created any such “deceptive” evidence. I don’t know how much of what science has uncovered and elucidated is misinterpretation, how much is bias toward naturalism, how much is non-evidence, how much is a test, or how much has some other explanation that neither side has considered. I don’t know and I don’t need to know. My only point has been to counter the argument that if the weight of evidence supporting or allowing for vast ages and evolution reaches some tipping point, that we must believe the evidence because it would be unjust for God to have had a hand in the planting of such evidence.

I should probably just let this rest, but one more point that occurred to me is the fact that all the things people have a problem with in a young-earth creation, calling it deception or a lie---nobody had any problem with any of it for the first few thousands of years of history. Nobody was deceived. Nobody saw anything but reasons to praise and glorify God in his marvelous creation throughout almost all of human history. It’s only in this final period of human history, when rationalism comes along and tries to push miracles and God out of the picture, that all of this evidence starts turning up and is in fact strenuously searched for.

Regardless of whatever shape or form creation took, was creation deceptive for the thousands of years that no one was deceived? If God had created a fossil (for the sake of argument; I'm not suggesting God created fossils but I wouldn't say he couldn't), and nobody ever found it, would it have been a lie? Would it have been deceptive if it was just a rock that communicated nothing to nobody?

Yet these evidences have been found, but only in the last days. I don’t know if Christ is returning next week or hundreds of years from now, but I do think we are in the last days, and the uncovering of what would confirm people in their rebellion is part of the spiritual purpose of what we’re talking about. I believe this may be a small part (not the main thrust but perhaps a supporting component) of what Paul prophesied in 2 Thessalonians 2:11, in describing the last days and the coming of the lawless one. “For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.” Those who say God never, ever deceives anyone, or else we can’t trust him in anything, need to come to terms with this verse. Could not part of that delusion that God himself promised to send be something that was here the whole time but deluding nobody? I still think the primary purpose of the rocks is to test and nurture a simple childlike faith which takes God at his word no matter what, but as we move closer to the end of time, the judgment purpose comes more and more to the fore.

I really don’t want to take this thread into a discussion of the last days, but I personally don’t think it’s a coincidence that the scientific tools by which we hear Satan’s whisper, “Did God really say?” show up at this time. Those who say Genesis is just an outdated cultural understanding of the beginning and that God would be a liar if he arranged things such that the findings of modern science do not tell us the true history of the world have a choice to make: Throughout almost all of human history God’s people have believed that Genesis was history. It was written as history. It was confirmed as history by all later references to the beginning. So either God led his own people to believe a falsehood for almost the entirety of human history, only to let science (not revelation) lead them to see the light in the last days (the same days that God predicted as a time of falling away and people no longer loving the truth), or else God revealed the truth throughout all generations, and in these last days he has given people over to delusion as the beginning of judgment. Which choice makes God less of a deceiver and more worthy of our trust? He showed his reliability by predicting that people would one day no longer consider his word so reliable or love the truth.

If people aren’t burned out on this topic yet, another approach I thought would be useful is to examine the whole question, “What is a lie?” And the question whether deceit can be righteous. (But perhaps that would belong in its own thread.) God commanded us not to kill, yet there is righteous killing. God commanded us not to be angry, yet there is righteous anger. God gave the Jews Sabbath laws, yet Jesus demonstrated that there was righteous breaking of the Sabbath laws. Could there not be righteous deception whenever, like in each of those other cases, it serves the good of a higher law? But I should warn you that if we get into that area, it will probably result in me writing another long tome that I’ll have to apologize for. (Now that I look back, this post seems to have somehow grown a lot longer when I wasn’t looking).

[TheLurch]

I personally don’t think it’s a coincidence that the scientific tools by which we hear Satan’s whisper.

Are you prepared to reject all of modern medicine? Throw away whatever device you typed that on? Condemn billions to starving by rejecting the green revolution? Because the scientific process that tells us the age of the earth and universe is the same scientific process that has provided the foundation for all modern technology. If it's a tool of Satan, why are you willing to use its fruits?

You're setting this up explicitly to be a war between rational thought and your religious faith, which is the surest route to fanaticism. We've got too many fanatics in the world right now, so please reconsider.


NB: that's not an attempt to quote mine; it's an attempt to get at the heart of the matter.

[Just Passing Through]

NB: that's not an attempt to quote mine; it's an attempt to get at the heart of the matter.

It sure looks like a quote mine. You skip what it is that I reject, Satan’s whisper, “Did God really say?” in response to those who suggest God didn’t really mean what he said about creation, to turn me into a fanatic Luddite. That particular whisper is all I reject. It’s silly to draw from that that I would reject all medicine and technology. I do not reject scientific tools, nor did I call scientific tools Satan’s tools or Satan’s whisper. Rather I pointed to a confluence of events: rationalism, the theory of evolution, and the timing of the ascent of modern scientific tools as a catalyst to the enormous changes of the modern era. The tools are not the problem; they’re just a catalyst, but one that came along at just the right time. They uncovered things that opened up the debate about origins.
Satan may be the one who would like to use such tools to lead people to believe we don’t need God anymore, either to explain how we got here or to sustain us in life or to redeem us for eternity, but God uses both the same scientific tools and all the evidence that they uncover to fulfill his own greater spiritual purposes and plan for the salvation history of the world.
As I have been saying, what science has uncovered is what God is using to test and nurture my faith and at the same time God may be using it to usher in the last times when the prophesied delusion takes hold of the world. I see the world today as a modern version of the tower of Babel, when mankind achieved the heights of technological prowess, but it led humanity to pride and an attitude that nothing is impossible and nothing is off-limits to mankind. But that hardly means I consider skyscrapers Satanic. These may be the last days, and I simply suggested I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the last times would be a time of great scientific progress and the glorification of man’s intellect. God foresaw both the timing and the course of scientific advancement, and he both prophesied what was to be and prepared for it.
You talk about all the good things we have gained from the scientific process as if that sanctifies everything it concludes. The scientific process is simply the organized use of reason, and reason is a wonderful gift of God when used properly. The scientific process is a valuable tool, but it rejects miracles out of hand because they don’t lend themselves to methodological investigation. If our world’s origin was miraculous, then using the scientific method to study it would be like using x-rays to study something that is completely transparent to them. You examine the film and don’t see anything. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there, and it doesn’t make x-rays Satanic; they’re just the wrong tool for the job. And the scientific process is the wrong tool for understanding divine creation.

[rogue06]

Yet these evidences have been found, but only in the last days...


I really don’t want to take this thread into a discussion of the last days, but I personally don’t think it’s a coincidence that the scientific tools by which we hear Satan’s whisper, “Did God really say?” show up at this time.

Christians have been debating the meaning of what God said pretty much from the start of Christianity. There was a great deal of disagreement among the Early Church Fathers (ECFs) over a great many things especially the stuff that wasn't considered essential. A good example of this concerned the nature of the days mentioned in the creation account. While indeed many saw the days as representing literal 24 hour long sequential days, but this wasn't even close to a unanimous view. Many others saw the days as representing a thousand years each and had different reasoning for doing so. Others said that the entire creation was instantaneous while other declared that it took place outside of time.

In fact with all the various ways of looking at them it might seem odd that it wasn't until Henry Morris (the father of the modern young earth creationist movement), at the 1982 International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in Chicago, did anyone ever propose making a 144-hour creation an issue when he moved to make it an essential component of a fundamentalist belief in inerrancy. It should be noted that every single member, including John C. Whitcomb who co-authored The Genesis Flood (basically the second bible of the YEC movement), voted against the idea.

And we've been comparing what some folks claimed what the bible said with what evidence God provided through His creation for a long time as well. Far longer than when Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler demonstrated that the earth wasn't immobile and the sun and everything else orbited it. St. Augustine brought up the issue on more than one occasion with probably the most notable one in his aptly titled De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim ("The Literal Meaning of Genesis"):

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

But there is another mention in De doctrina christiana ("On Christian Doctrine") worthy of pointing out:

At the outset, you must be very careful lest you take figurative expression literally. What the apostle says pertains to this problem: "for the letter killeth, but the spirit quikeneth." That is, when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally [carnalia]. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the passing of the letter [hoc est, intelligentia carni subjicitur sequndo litteram]

[oxmixmudd]

Okay, I'm not going to be able to prove diddly here - but it strikes me that you're leaving out an option. The assumption that the appearance of age must be deceptive leaves out a alternate possibility - that the 'appearance' is a misunderstanding of the actual process(es).

That, of course, may not be the case - but to leave it out as a posit frames the argument poorly. It also creates a rather tunnel view on both sides - without acknowledging that hey, maybe, just maybe, all the evidence isn't in (and by both sides I MEAN both sides. Seriously, using Scripture to ascribe something it never specifically addresses - or seems to care about - is really shaky at best).

And for the record, I'm an AoE agnostic - I don't think either side truly knows enough to conclusively date the Earth, the Universe or the average lonely geek.

The issue that is hard to recognize without significant study is the amount of self-consistent evidence all pointing at the same conclusion. It is simply improbable on a scale that is beyond comprehension that that could be the 'accidental' result of some other process. This is what YEC is all about. The hope there is some way what we see could accidentally be the result of God's six day creative process. And even they realize that hope is hopeless - that is why they distort the truth through quote mining and don't tell their audience the truth about the scientific illegitimacy of the arguments they try to use.

There are only two options. That God has some legitimate purpose for faking a billion year old universe, or a billion year old universe.

Jim

[oxmixmudd]

Okay, I'm not going to be able to prove diddly here - but it strikes me that you're leaving out an option. The assumption that the appearance of age must be deceptive leaves out a alternate possibility - that the 'appearance' is a misunderstanding of the actual process(es).

That, of course, may not be the case - but to leave it out as a posit frames the argument poorly. It also creates a rather tunnel view on both sides - without acknowledging that hey, maybe, just maybe, all the evidence isn't in (and by both sides I MEAN both sides. Seriously, using Scripture to ascribe something it never specifically addresses - or seems to care about - is really shaky at best).

And for the record, I'm an AoE agnostic - I don't think either side truly knows enough to conclusively date the Earth, the Universe or the average lonely geek.

Teal,

I want add also that it is the language of Genesis as it describes the sky in the first chapter that frees me to be able to say there is no theological reason to hold out the typical YEC hope that nearly all the conclusions of science as regards the history of the universe are flawed. It is clear to me through the language used that God was not communicating technical data there. He allowed the writer to describe the creation itself in terms derived from the culture of that time. A description that is wrong* in terms of scientific correctness. If we belive the text to be inspired, then this scientific inaccuracy tells us scientific knowledge is not the targeted truth of the text.

Jim

*wrong here gets complicated. The Sun appears to rise in the morning, so we still say sunrise. But we no longer belive the earth is a flat plate abd the Sun moves across a domed sky. So descriptive language is not wrong as long as it is limited to being a description of what is seen and no expectation exists that such a description can be used to derive a factual representation of the underlying mechanism that produces the observation.

[Just Passing Through]

Christians have been debating the meaning of what God said pretty much from the start of Christianity. There was a great deal of disagreement among the Early Church Fathers (ECFs) over a great many things especially the stuff that wasn't considered essential. A good example of this concerned the nature of the days mentioned in the creation account. While indeed many saw the days as representing literal 24 hour long sequential days, but this wasn't even close to a unanimous view. Many others saw the days as representing a thousand years each and had different reasoning for doing so. Others said that the entire creation was instantaneous while other declared that it took place outside of time.

As far as I know the only church fathers who equated the days of creation with a thousand years were layering an allegorical meaning on top of the literal. They believed a literal and historic six 24-hour days referred allegorically to six thousand years of subsequent history, the world’s current activity, that would be followed by a still future thousand years of rest.
And those who said it was instantaneous or outside of time would have simply meant, “What’s time to an eternal God?” Since there were no people around to experience those days the conscious and temporal flow of time could be meaningless. Saying that God’s perspective on time is incomprehensible is hardly equivalent to tossing out the whole story as myth.
Some people swallowed Greek ideas about matter being eternal, but the fact that error in interpretation existed does not invalidate my own points.

In fact with all the various ways of looking at them it might seem odd that it wasn't until Henry Morris (the father of the modern young earth creationist movement), at the 1982 International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in Chicago, did anyone ever propose making a 144-hour creation an issue when he moved to make it an essential component of a fundamentalist belief in inerrancy. It should be noted that every single member, including John C. Whitcomb who co-authored The Genesis Flood (basically the second bible of the YEC movement), voted against the idea.

I don’t know anything about that conference, but I suspect the objection that was raised pertained to it being “an essential component of fundamentalist belief.” Fundamental doctrines are considered those that, when denied, mean that a person cannot be saved. I, too, would object if someone said all theistic evolutionists are going to hell.

And we've been comparing what some folks claimed what the bible said with what evidence God provided through His creation for a long time as well. Far longer than when Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler demonstrated that the earth wasn't immobile and the sun and everything else orbited it. St. Augustine brought up the issue on more than one occasion with probably the most notable one in his aptly titled De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim ("The Literal Meaning of Genesis"):

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."


But there is another mention in De doctrina christiana ("On Christian Doctrine") worthy of pointing out:

At the outset, you must be very careful lest you take figurative expression literally. What the apostle says pertains to this problem: "for the letter killeth, but the spirit quikeneth." That is, when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally [carnalia]. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the passing of the letter [hoc est, intelligentia carni subjicitur sequndo litteram]

Augustine made several attempts at his own allegorical layering on top of the historic meaning of Genesis, and he never succeeded in forming a satisfactory framework for that. And from that he extended the warning not to turn such interpretations into infallible doctrine, in particular in scientific matters where your speculation might be provably false. But he kept going back to the literal meaning as foundational and said,

Source: De Genesi ad Litteram,1.21.41, in Taylor, ref. 6, pp. 44–45

“When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove [Latin; demonstrare] some fact of physical science [Latin; natura rerum veracibus = true nature of things], we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, [Latin; Quidquid autem de quibuslibet suis voluminibus his nostris Litteris, id est catholicae fidei contrarium protulerint] either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. And we will so cling to our Mediator, ‘in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’, that we will not be led astray by the glib talk of false philosophy or frightened by the superstition of false religion.”

© Copyright Original Source

He acknowledge that it was difficult to know how to interpret Genesis from a scientific perspective, but affirmed that the proper reading was literal and historic. He rejected vast ages for the earth: “They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.” [City of God, 12:10]

There are only two options. That God has some legitimate purpose for faking a billion year old universe, or a billion year old universe.

Or God has some legitimate purpose for making the earth’s age undeterminable by scientific inquiry.

I want add also that it is the language of Genesis as it describes the sky in the first chapter that frees me to be able to say there is no theological reason to hold out the typical YEC hope that nearly all the conclusions of science as regards the history of the universe are flawed. It is clear to me through the language used that God was not communicating technical data there. He allowed the writer to describe the creation itself in terms derived from the culture of that time. A description that is wrong* in terms of scientific correctness. If we belive the text to be inspired, then this scientific inaccuracy tells us scientific knowledge is not the targeted truth of the text.

Jim

*wrong here gets complicated. The Sun appears to rise in the morning, so we still say sunrise. But we no longer belive the earth is a flat plate abd the Sun moves across a domed sky. So descriptive language is not wrong as long as it is limited to being a description of what is seen and no expectation exists that such a description can be used to derive a factual representation of the underlying mechanism that produces the observation.

That seems a rather odd take on it. Apparently we are allowed to say the sun rose because we know that its not scientifically accurate, but the Spirit (who knows science better than we do) is not allowed to inspire authors to describe creation in purely descriptive terms unless the writers had full scientific knowledge of the mechanisms behind that description? And that allows you to conclude that the description is not only not scientific but it is not actually describing anything at all?

[oxmixmudd]

As far as I know the only church fathers who equated the days of creation with a thousand years were layering an allegorical meaning on top of the literal. They believed a literal and historic six 24-hour days referred allegorically to six thousand years of subsequent history, the world’s current activity, that would be followed by a still future thousand years of rest.
And those who said it was instantaneous or outside of time would have simply meant, “What’s time to an eternal God?” Since there were no people around to experience those days the conscious and temporal flow of time could be meaningless. Saying that God’s perspective on time is incomprehensible is hardly equivalent to tossing out the whole story as myth.
Some people swallowed Greek ideas about matter being eternal, but the fact that error in interpretation existed does not invalidate my own points.



I don’t know anything about that conference, but I suspect the objection that was raised pertained to it being “an essential component of fundamentalist belief.” Fundamental doctrines are considered those that, when denied, mean that a person cannot be saved. I, too, would object if someone said all theistic evolutionists are going to hell.




Augustine made several attempts at his own allegorical layering on top of the historic meaning of Genesis, and he never succeeded in forming a satisfactory framework for that. And from that he extended the warning not to turn such interpretations into infallible doctrine, in particular in scientific matters where your speculation might be provably false. But he kept going back to the literal meaning as foundational and said,

Source: De Genesi ad Litteram,1.21.41, in Taylor, ref. 6, pp. 44–45

“When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove [Latin; demonstrare] some fact of physical science [Latin; natura rerum veracibus = true nature of things], we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, [Latin; Quidquid autem de quibuslibet suis voluminibus his nostris Litteris, id est catholicae fidei contrarium protulerint] either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. And we will so cling to our Mediator, ‘in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’, that we will not be led astray by the glib talk of false philosophy or frightened by the superstition of false religion.”

© Copyright Original Source

He acknowledge that it was difficult to know how to interpret Genesis from a scientific perspective, but affirmed that the proper reading was literal and historic. He rejected vast ages for the earth: “They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.” [City of God, 12:10]




Or God has some legitimate purpose for making the earth’s age undeterminable by scientific inquiry.



That seems a rather odd take on it. Apparently we are allowed to say the sun rose because we know that its not scientifically accurate, but the Spirit (who knows science better than we do) is not allowed to inspire authors to describe creation in purely descriptive terms unless the writers had full scientific knowledge of the mechanisms behind that description? And that allows you to conclude that the description is not only not scientific but it is not actually describing anything at all?

You don't seem to have understood my point or the comparison you make here has somehow become something other than what you intended. Either way, I'd be shooting in the dark if I tried to repond to it as is. Could you clarify?

Also, If you won't take the few extra seconds to create separate replies to different people's posts, then neither will I bother to edit them so that only your reply to me is the only text of yours in my response.

Jim

[Just Passing Through]

My comment, being mostly negative, did not deserve any more prominence than it got, and as it didn’t really add anything constructive to the discussion, no, I don’t care to expound or clarify.

[tabibito]

One: To leave room for faith by leaving room for doubt. How could we say “by faith we understand that the worlds were formed at God’s command,” if we had proof? Any proof.

Scripturally, faith is supposed to have its foundation in evidence.

God tells us plainly that miracles do not create faith. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham said people would not believe even if someone came back from the dead.

Agreed. It is a matter then, of working out what role miracles and evidence play in faith.

Both miracles and proof tend to get in the way of the true essence of faith, simple trust and utter reliance on God for wisdom. When God gave the Israelites proof in the wilderness, it tended to make them proud, self-entitled, and apt to complain whenever God didn’t do what they thought he should. That’s what his people would be like today if we were surrounded by the kind of pillar-of-fire proof that God is real which the Israelites had in the wilderness. (That’s what some of us are like even without such manifestations, but arrogance would be the norm, not the regrettable exception).

To those who chose to believe, these things were considered a creditable witness.

So God has good reason to hide his miracles, why his angels stay invisible, why irrefutable faith-healings don’t come along every time one of God’s children pray. He hides his most incredible works behind the curtains of natural laws and natural history to keep us humble and trusting. But what other way could he possibly have hidden his biggest and greatest miracle of creation, except by the perfectly natural appearances of our world and universe?

I find a more likely explanation to be that God does not act independently of those whom he appoints to make him known.

In general, the only miracles unbelievers are allowed to witness, as an unmistakable miracle, are miracles of judgment. Even when God spoke directly out of heaven at times, the unbelievers present only heard the sound of thunder. Whether the lack of evidence for a miraculous origin is judgment against unbelief or merely patience, giving his Word time to convert without miracles getting in the way, is an individual matter.

And yet, miracles were performed under the very noses of those who opposed Christ, and still they did not accept the witness of the Holy Spirit . They considered the miracles to be evidence of sorcery that Christ had learnt in Egypt - and in this age "unexplained natural causes" would replace the allegations of sorcery.

Fourth: Even for believers the obscuring of the truth serves a purpose, as a test and exercise of faith. God told Abraham to kill his son. Abraham could have said, “Well, that contradicts what I know about God’s character, therefore this cannot be from God.” No, the hardest test was also the best way to build Abraham’s faith. The hardest test of faith, to believe God is our creator even when the smartest and most respected scientists and the evidence of our own eyes may say, “No, he’s not,” serves God’s righteous purposes in a most gracious way.

The evidence does not contradict the existence of a creator: scientism, not science, makes that claim.

Consider Job, who thought God was unjust to make a righteous man suffer. It contradicted Job’s sense of fairness and rightness and what he thought he knew of God’s character. When God says one thing in his Word, and the evidence of our eyes says something else, to say that God would be unrighteous or deceptive if he did what we don’t think a righteous God should have done, we’re being just like Job. God didn’t answer the accusation or explain why he did what he did; he just said, “Were you there when I created the world? Then you have no right to judge me or question how I do things you can’t understand.” We should expect the same answer if we make ourselves God’s judge and jury when we question what he tells us and what he has done in creation.

But God did make his presence and care known, and moreover, while God criticised Job, Job was nonetheless declared by God to be in the right. Adversity (im)proves faith - it doesn't have a lot to do with establishing faith.

God could easily have given us a world that left no room for doubt. Instead of a sun, he could have put his own throne in the sky (and that would have been easier than designing stars from scratch). He could have given us a world that is capable of sustaining itself but impossible to develop naturally. He didn’t. He chose to give us a natural looking world. Whether he chose to do that by natural means or miraculous ones doesn't change the fact that he chose to give us a natural looking world. That wasn’t easy to do. No matter which theory of origins you hold to, that in itself should tell us he has a strong desire to lead us to trust in him as our creator by faith, not by sight, not by constant miracles or objectively provable miraculous origins, simply because he says so and not because the scientists say so.

Again - we are given cause to trust by the evidence and experience (both direct and indirect) that God is trustworthy.

[TheLurch]

It sure looks like a quote mine. You skip what it is that I reject, Satan’s whisper, “Did God really say?” in response to those who suggest God didn’t really mean what he said about creation, to turn me into a fanatic Luddite. That particular whisper is all I reject. It’s silly to draw from that that I would reject all medicine and technology. I do not reject scientific tools, nor did I call scientific tools Satan’s tools or Satan’s whisper. Rather I pointed to a confluence of events: rationalism, the theory of evolution, and the timing of the ascent of modern scientific tools as a catalyst to the enormous changes of the modern era. The tools are not the problem; they’re just a catalyst, but one that came along at just the right time. They uncovered things that opened up the debate about origins.

Well, i'm sorry i misunderstood you then.

But i still don't get why you're willing to accept the products of science (both practical and knowledge-wise) in some contexts but not others. Couldn't it be that the discovery of the Higgs in the LHC didn't actually take place, and was the result of a miracle that made it look like the Higgs? How do you tell which cases are miraculous and which are not?

[Teallaura]

Teal,

I want add also that it is the language of Genesis as it describes the sky in the first chapter that frees me to be able to say there is no theological reason to hold out the typical YEC hope that nearly all the conclusions of science as regards the history of the universe are flawed. It is clear to me through the language used that God was not communicating technical data there. He allowed the writer to describe the creation itself in terms derived from the culture of that time. A description that is wrong* in terms of scientific correctness. If we belive the text to be inspired, then this scientific inaccuracy tells us scientific knowledge is not the targeted truth of the text.

Jim

*wrong here gets complicated. The Sun appears to rise in the morning, so we still say sunrise. But we no longer belive the earth is a flat plate abd the Sun moves across a domed sky. So descriptive language is not wrong as long as it is limited to being a description of what is seen and no expectation exists that such a description can be used to derive a factual representation of the underlying mechanism that produces the observation.

Jim,

I have no investment in either approach - I meant exactly what I said - I don't see a Scriptural justification for a reliable dating system and I'm equally unconvinced by systems that rely on extrapolations based on assumptions. I don't know or care how old the Earth/universe are - it's theologically unnecessary and beyond my expertise otherwise.

And I'm perfectly good with 'not a text book, get over it' so long as we don't go totally to the other extreme of 'it's all metaphor'.

I get that you have cause to accept the old universe dating systems - nor do I argue that they are necessarily wrong. Again, beyond my scope. However, the biggest mistake we make sometimes is assuming too much about what we 'know' - and forgetting that certainty is a scale, not a point. To omit the possibility that there's something you missed is not a good plan - and neither is obsessing over that possibility when it seems remote. For personal effort, skip the unlikely - perfectly reasonable choice. But to omit it from debate is poor argumentation - even if it's nothing more than a bullet point in the list.

Personally, I find JPT's argument - awkward. But I haven't had time to dig through all of this thread so he may be doing much better and I just didn't get it. If it's based in the idea that God intended to deceive, that I reject as theologically untenable. I think it's more 'God doesn't have to play by your rules' which is true but pointless. Like I said, I'm not sure enough about his argument.

It's a big, cool, universe - my hope is that we get to play explorers in the New Creation. I just doubt its age will mean much then, either.

[TheLurch]

I'm equally unconvinced by systems that rely on extrapolations based on assumptions.

I'm just curious as to what assumptions you consider to be in operation for various methods of dating.