The death of another YEC PRATT

[Juvenal]

Regardless of what it means for YECs, this is a very cool finding. Things with a stable orbit in the solar system have an eccentricity of less than 1. Those with an eccentricity of somewhat above one will pass by the sun once on a ...

... hyperbolic orbit.

Circles have eccentricity 0, ellipses between 0 and 1, parabolas exactly 1, hyperbolas greater than 1.

[shunyadragon]

Astronomy and Cosmology that continue to offer up evidence that the universe is older by a few magnitude that several thousand years.

All of science has moved far beyond the fundamentalist Christian worldview of the nature of our physical existence by thousands of years. One failure of 'arguing from ignorance' hardly adds to their pile of failures, and deliberate dishonest self-imposed ignorance of science to justify a religious agenda.

Lucretius was much closer to the reality of the nature of our physical existence over 2000 years ago than the Christian fundamentalists today.

[rogue06]

All of science has moved far beyond the fundamentalist Christian worldview of the nature of our physical existence by thousands of years. One failure of 'arguing from ignorance' hardly adds to their pile of failures, and deliberate dishonest self-imposed ignorance of science to justify a religious agenda.

Lucretius was much closer to the reality of the nature of our physical existence over 2000 years ago than the Christian fundamentalists today.

Blissfully unaware that many of the contributors to The Fundamentals (IOW, the original "fundamentalists") accepted that the earth was incredibly ancient and a significant number were either open to or accepted evolution.

Please quit with the broad brushing.

[shunyadragon]

Blissfully unaware that many of the contributors to The Fundamentals (IOW, the original "fundamentalists") accepted that the earth was incredibly ancient and a significant number were either open to or accepted evolution.

Please quit with the broad brushing.

Check your history, because most of the Church Fathers believed in a literal Genesis and a young earth. The 'broad brush is valid for the dominant view in history up until the past several hundred years as science developed a coherent definitive well documented view base don the evidence.

It still remains the dominant view of 40% or more of the Christians of the USA today.

[rogue06]

Check your history, because most of the Church Fathers believed in a literal Genesis and a young earth. The 'broad brush is valid for the dominant view in history up until the past several hundred years as science developed a coherent definitive well documented view base don the evidence.

It still remains the dominant view of 40% or more of the Christians of the USA today.

While they accepted a young earth simply because there was no contradicting evidence available at that time they had a variety of different ideas of how the days of the Genesis 1 should be regarded ranging from taking place outside of time, taking place instantly, lasting a thousand years each as well as being literal 24 hour long days.

But you specifically brought up "fundamentalists" which is why I noted that many of the originators of that movement accepted an ancient earth and a significant portion were even either open to or embraced evolutionary theory.

[shunyadragon]

While they accepted a young earth simply because there was no contradicting evidence available at that time they had a variety of different ideas of how the days of the Genesis 1 should be regarded ranging from taking place outside of time, taking place instantly, lasting a thousand years each as well as being literal 24 hour long days.

But you specifically brought up "fundamentalists" which is why I noted that many of the originators of that movement accepted an ancient earth and a significant portion were even either open to or embraced evolutionary theory.

Noted?!?!? no references.

You have failed to respond to the fact that most Church Fathers believed in a literal Genesis. The marginal ancient earth? included the literal Noah flood. There is absolutely no evidence that the early Church Fathers remotely considered evolution an option.

See this thread that documents the views of the Church Fathers.

The belief that Genesis is literal does consider Creation taking place in either 7 days or 7 thousand years. Clearly I said the majority. As noted only one argued for a symbolic representation of Creation; St. John Chrysostom.




More to follow . . .

[rogue06]

Noted?!?!? no references.

You have failed to respond to the fact that most Church Fathers believed in a literal Genesis. The marginal ancient earth? included the literal Noah flood. There is absolutely no evidence that the early Church Fathers remotely considered evolution an option.

See this thread that documents the views of the Church Fathers.

The belief that Genesis is literal does consider Creation taking place in either 7 days or 7 thousand years. Clearly I said the majority. As noted only one argued for a symbolic representation of Creation; St. John Chrysostom.




More to follow . . .

[*SIGH*]

What part of

While they accepted a young earth simply because there was no contradicting evidence available at that time they had a variety of different ideas of how the days of the Genesis 1 should be regarded ranging from taking place outside of time, taking place instantly, lasting a thousand years each as well as being literal 24 hour long days.

was not addressing your statement about the ECFs?


I said "noted" because I mistakenly thought this was the thread this recently came up in and in which I posted

As an aside even several of the authors of The Fundamentals (from which "fundamentalism" got its name) were either open to or outright accepted evolution including James Orr, R. A. Torrey, E.Y. Mullins, Benjamin Warfield (who also played a pivotal role in the formulation of the concept of inerrancy) and even George Frederick Wright who would waffle back and forth but even in his "anti" periods was focusing on materialistic evolution and seemingly still open to theistic evolution.

[shunyadragon]

[*SIGH*]

What part of

While they accepted a young earth simply because there was no contradicting evidence available at that time they had a variety of different ideas of how the days of the Genesis 1 should be regarded ranging from taking place outside of time, taking place instantly, lasting a thousand years each as well as being literal 24 hour long days.

was not addressing your statement about the ECFs?

Statement to vague without references.

I said "noted" because I mistakenly thought this was the thread this recently came up in and in which I posted

This reference does not specifically deal with the references from the early Church Fathers nor the beliefs of the church through history. You need more specific references to justify your argument. I provide specific references to what the early Church Father believed, and the early church.



The belief in a Literal Genesis authored by Moses is an important point in 'Sola Scriptora' during the times of the Church Fathers, through the history of the churches and today.

Still neglected the fact that even today the polls show a greater than 40% of the USA believes in a literal Genesis, and more than 46% believe the Theory of Evolution is in conflict with their beliefs.

[rogue06]

facepalm3.gif

You brought up fundamentalists, which I addressed. You also brought up the Early Church Fathers (ECFs), which I briefly addressed since that wasn't the thrust of my point.

But since you keep bringing it up...

As I already indicated, there was a lot of disagreement over the nature of the days of creation among the ECFs -- although, importantly absolutely nobody thought this disagreement was important.

While a number of ECFs thought that the days did indeed represent literal 24 hour long sequential days, others held that creation took place instantaneously, a few that it took place outside of time and some held that each day represented a thousand years (Psalm 90:4; cf. II Peter 3:8).

It appears that those in the latter group had varying reasons to do so although one of the most popular is based upon the fact that Adam didn't die within 24 hours after eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as he was told ("for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" -- Genesis 2:17) but lived until he was 930 years old (Genesis 5:5). To them this indicated that the days were a thousand years.

For example, Justin Martyr, while writing about the reign of a thousand years, wrote in his "Dialogue With Trypho", Chapter 81, when he commented that^[1]:

For as Adam was told that in the day he ate of the tree he would die, we know that he did not complete a thousand years.

Twenty or thirty years later, in his Adversus Haereses ("Against Heresies"), Book 5, Chapter 23 (written between 175 and 185 AD), Irenaeus expressed a similar sentiment:

And there are some, again, who relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since "a day of the Lord is as a thousand years," he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them, thus bearing out the sentence of his sin.

Later (c. 250 AD) Cyprian of Carthage, in his "Treatise 11," or "Exhortation to Martyrdom," (section 11), also expresses a comparable view in passing when he observed that

As the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing seven thousand years

Victorinus of Pettau, who I've heard even some YECs say taught that the days were 24 hours long^[2], wrote in "On the Creation of the World" that

Wherefore to those seven days the Lord attributed to each a thousand years

between 160 and 150 BC)^[3]:



Several centuries later a similar saying occurs in the B'reshith Rabba on Genesis 3:8:

I said to him, on the day thou eatest of it, thou shalt surely die. But you know not whether it is one of My days or one of yours. Behold I give him one of my days which is as a thousand years.

It should also be noted that Jewish philosophers such as Philo stressed a "spiritual" or allegorical interpretation for scripture, rejected the idea of a literal 6 day creation.


Among those who thought that the creation took place outside of time is Clement of Alexandria who, around 208 A.D., wrote in his Miscellanies:



In his Stromata^[4]. In De Genesi ad literam ("Literal Meaning of Genesis") he wrote:

Thus, in all the days of creation there is one day, and it is not to be taken in the sense of our day, which we reckon by the course of the sun; but it must have another meaning, applicable to the three days mentioned before the creation of the heavenly bodies.

He expanded upon this in De Civitate Dei ("City of God"), Book XI, Chapter 6 he wrote:

But simultaneously with time the world was made, if in the world's creation change and motion were created, as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!

Also worth noting was that another supporter of the literal six day creation, Martin Luther, even lamented in his lectures on Genesis from 1535 that^[5]:

Hilary and Augustine, almost the two greatest lights of the church, hold that the world was created instantaneously and all at the same time, not successively in the course of six days.

Also, Basil of Caesarea, who provides one of the most detailed expositions of the six days of creation to come down to us from the early church, was convinced that the world was created "in less than an instant."

Further, as can be seen in his Hexameron while writing about the creation of plants, Basil wrote in the same work that:

God did not command the earth immediately to give forth seed and fruit, but to produce germs, to grow green, and to arrive at maturity in the seed; so that this first command teaches nature what she has to do in the course of ages.

This seems to suggest that he didn't believe that plants appeared in a single day.

IIRC, Ambrose (c. 339-397) largely followed Basil but I'm not certain.

FWICT, at least in the Western or Latin Church, it wasn't until the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) that the trend in which commentators preferred to understand the six days to be real days took solid hold. While some commentators, such as John Scotus Erigena (c. 815-877), still followed Augustine's views, most followed Bede's approach, sometimes combining various elements from both views as in the case of Robert Grossteste (c. 1168-1253), who also emphasized the literary structure of Genesis 1 with three days of ordering and three days of parallel adornment.

And yet according to The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, edited by Henry Snyder Geliman, 1970, p. 191 (in the entry on Creation):

Before the Reformation, scholars were uncertain whether the days of Genesis 1 denote a succession of time or are merely the distribution into logical groups of things created by one divine fiat (Augustine, "De Civitate," xi. 6,7). During the next 300 years the narrative was understood to mean that God created the universe in one week of 7 consecutive days of 24 hours each.

The take away point of all this is that there was far from any consensus concerning the nature of the days mentioned in the creation account of Genesis 1 among early Christians and moreover they showed not the slightest indication that such a disparity of views was troublesome or important.

Nor did it ever become part of any creed nor has it even been discussed by a Council or Synod. And none of the great Reformed confessions make any comment on the matter of the nature of creation. Not the French Confession (1559), the Scots' Confession (1560), the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563, 1571) or any of the others. They may stress the sovereign action of God in creating all things but the universal absence of any reference connected even remotely to the issue of the days of creation or the processes involved establishes that it was not a confessional issue in the slightest.

And the reason that it wasn't a matter of definition is because it was not a matter of controversy or even a point for discussion, despite the varying views in exegetical history. As I've shown above there have always been wildly divergent views regarding this subject and not once has it been thought necessary to form a single orthodox view.

The closest this ever even came to taking place was during the 1982 International Council on Biblical Inerrancy where the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was crafted by a group of largely very conservative evangelicals. There the father of the modern creationist movement, Henry Morris, sought to include a 144-hour creation as an essential component of a fundamentalist belief in inerrancy. It was rejected by every other member -- including by other YECs such as the co-author of the book with Morris that launched the modern YEC movement (John C. Whitcomb -- The Genesis Flood).













1. Recently I read of someone declaring that in Justin Martyr's case he believed that Adam's thousand-year day was actually the first of seven that encompassed all of world history. But that would mean that if animals such as cattle and the like came about on the sixth day that would have been only a thousand years prior to Justin Martyr's time. I seriously doubt that he thought that the camels and other animals that Abraham had didn't exist yet. Or that Moses was a shepherd of non-existent animals while staying with his father-in-law while in exhile.

2. James Mook, "The Church Fathers on Genesis, the Flood, and the Age of the Earth," in Terry Mortenson and Thane H. Ury (both employed by AnswersinGenesis (AiG) -- and hence YEC), eds., "Coming to Grips with Genesis"

3. One source lists this as Jubilees 4:29-30 (HERE as well) whereas another says it was Jubilees 4:21

4. Even AnswersinGenesis (AiG) admits that Augustine thought that everything was created simultaneously and not over the course of six literal 24 hour long days.

And IIRC in his Confessiones ("Confessions") Augustine maintained that the seventh day of creation continues (it has no evening or morning because God sanctified it for everlasting continuance) giving yet another indication that he doesn't think hold that the "days" of creation were literal 24 hour long ones.

5. In Summa Theologica Aquinas also recognized the difference of opinion among the early fathers for the proper interpretation of "days" in Genesis 1.

[Juvenal]

Wiki: 2I/Borisov

2I/Borisov, originally designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov),[8][12] is the first observed interstellar comet[13][6] and the second observed interstellar interloper after ʻOumuamua.[14][15] 2I/Borisov has a heliocentric orbital eccentricity of 3.3 and is not bound to the Sun.[3] The comet will pass through the ecliptic of the Solar System in December 2019, with the closest approach to the Sun at just under 2 au on 8 December 2019.

So looks like it won't be visible without a telescope.

[Leonhard]

PRATT?

As in Pratt Institute?

[rogue06]

PRATT?

As in Pratt Institute?

An acronym for Point Refuted A Thousand Times.

[Leonhard]

An acronym for Point Refuted A Thousand Times.

Thanks, it wasn't obvious to me. I've been out of the discussions on evolution vs creationism ever since the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial.

[Rushing Jaws]

All of science has moved far beyond the fundamentalist Christian worldview of the nature of our physical existence by thousands of years. One failure of 'arguing from ignorance' hardly adds to their pile of failures, and deliberate dishonest self-imposed ignorance of science to justify a religious agenda.

Lucretius was much closer to the reality of the nature of our physical existence over 2000 years ago than the Christian fundamentalists today.

[shunyadragon]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]40348[/ATTACH]

You brought up fundamentalists, which I addressed. You also brought up the Early Church Fathers (ECFs), which I briefly addressed since that wasn't the thrust of my point.

But since you keep bringing it up...

As I already indicated, there was a lot of disagreement over the nature of the days of creation among the ECFs -- although, importantly absolutely nobody thought this disagreement was important.

While a number of ECFs thought that the days did indeed represent literal 24 hour long sequential days, others held that creation took place instantaneously, a few that it took place outside of time and some held that each day represented a thousand years (Psalm 90:4; cf. II Peter 3:8).

It appears that those in the latter group had varying reasons to do so although one of the most popular is based upon the fact that Adam didn't die within 24 hours after eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as he was told ("for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" -- Genesis 2:17) but lived until he was 930 years old (Genesis 5:5). To them this indicated that the days were a thousand years.

For example, Justin Martyr, while writing about the reign of a thousand years, wrote in his "Dialogue With Trypho", Chapter 81, when he commented that^[1]:

For as Adam was told that in the day he ate of the tree he would die, we know that he did not complete a thousand years.

Twenty or thirty years later, in his Adversus Haereses ("Against Heresies"), Book 5, Chapter 23 (written between 175 and 185 AD), Irenaeus expressed a similar sentiment:

And there are some, again, who relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since "a day of the Lord is as a thousand years," he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them, thus bearing out the sentence of his sin.

Later (c. 250 AD) Cyprian of Carthage, in his "Treatise 11," or "Exhortation to Martyrdom," (section 11), also expresses a comparable view in passing when he observed that

As the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing seven thousand years

Victorinus of Pettau, who I've heard even some YECs say taught that the days were 24 hours long^[2], wrote in "On the Creation of the World" that

Wherefore to those seven days the Lord attributed to each a thousand years

between 160 and 150 BC)^[3]:



Several centuries later a similar saying occurs in the B'reshith Rabba on Genesis 3:8:

I said to him, on the day thou eatest of it, thou shalt surely die. But you know not whether it is one of My days or one of yours. Behold I give him one of my days which is as a thousand years.

It should also be noted that Jewish philosophers such as Philo stressed a "spiritual" or allegorical interpretation for scripture, rejected the idea of a literal 6 day creation.


Among those who thought that the creation took place outside of time is Clement of Alexandria who, around 208 A.D., wrote in his Miscellanies:



In his Stromata^[4]. In De Genesi ad literam ("Literal Meaning of Genesis") he wrote:

Thus, in all the days of creation there is one day, and it is not to be taken in the sense of our day, which we reckon by the course of the sun; but it must have another meaning, applicable to the three days mentioned before the creation of the heavenly bodies.

He expanded upon this in De Civitate Dei ("City of God"), Book XI, Chapter 6 he wrote:

But simultaneously with time the world was made, if in the world's creation change and motion were created, as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!

Also worth noting was that another supporter of the literal six day creation, Martin Luther, even lamented in his lectures on Genesis from 1535 that^[5]:

Hilary and Augustine, almost the two greatest lights of the church, hold that the world was created instantaneously and all at the same time, not successively in the course of six days.

Also, Basil of Caesarea, who provides one of the most detailed expositions of the six days of creation to come down to us from the early church, was convinced that the world was created "in less than an instant."

Further, as can be seen in his Hexameron while writing about the creation of plants, Basil wrote in the same work that:

God did not command the earth immediately to give forth seed and fruit, but to produce germs, to grow green, and to arrive at maturity in the seed; so that this first command teaches nature what she has to do in the course of ages.

This seems to suggest that he didn't believe that plants appeared in a single day.

IIRC, Ambrose (c. 339-397) largely followed Basil but I'm not certain.

FWICT, at least in the Western or Latin Church, it wasn't until the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) that the trend in which commentators preferred to understand the six days to be real days took solid hold. While some commentators, such as John Scotus Erigena (c. 815-877), still followed Augustine's views, most followed Bede's approach, sometimes combining various elements from both views as in the case of Robert Grossteste (c. 1168-1253), who also emphasized the literary structure of Genesis 1 with three days of ordering and three days of parallel adornment.

And yet according to The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, edited by Henry Snyder Geliman, 1970, p. 191 (in the entry on Creation):

Before the Reformation, scholars were uncertain whether the days of Genesis 1 denote a succession of time or are merely the distribution into logical groups of things created by one divine fiat (Augustine, "De Civitate," xi. 6,7). During the next 300 years the narrative was understood to mean that God created the universe in one week of 7 consecutive days of 24 hours each.

The take away point of all this is that there was far from any consensus concerning the nature of the days mentioned in the creation account of Genesis 1 among early Christians and moreover they showed not the slightest indication that such a disparity of views was troublesome or important.

Nor did it ever become part of any creed nor has it even been discussed by a Council or Synod. And none of the great Reformed confessions make any comment on the matter of the nature of creation. Not the French Confession (1559), the Scots' Confession (1560), the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563, 1571) or any of the others. They may stress the sovereign action of God in creating all things but the universal absence of any reference connected even remotely to the issue of the days of creation or the processes involved establishes that it was not a confessional issue in the slightest.

And the reason that it wasn't a matter of definition is because it was not a matter of controversy or even a point for discussion, despite the varying views in exegetical history. As I've shown above there have always been wildly divergent views regarding this subject and not once has it been thought necessary to form a single orthodox view.

The closest this ever even came to taking place was during the 1982 International Council on Biblical Inerrancy where the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was crafted by a group of largely very conservative evangelicals. There the father of the modern creationist movement, Henry Morris, sought to include a 144-hour creation as an essential component of a fundamentalist belief in inerrancy. It was rejected by every other member -- including by other YECs such as the co-author of the book with Morris that launched the modern YEC movement (John C. Whitcomb -- The Genesis Flood).













1. Recently I read of someone declaring that in Justin Martyr's case he believed that Adam's thousand-year day was actually the first of seven that encompassed all of world history. But that would mean that if animals such as cattle and the like came about on the sixth day that would have been only a thousand years prior to Justin Martyr's time. I seriously doubt that he thought that the camels and other animals that Abraham had didn't exist yet. Or that Moses was a shepherd of non-existent animals while staying with his father-in-law while in exhile.

2. James Mook, "The Church Fathers on Genesis, the Flood, and the Age of the Earth," in Terry Mortenson and Thane H. Ury (both employed by AnswersinGenesis (AiG) -- and hence YEC), eds., "Coming to Grips with Genesis"

3. One source lists this as Jubilees 4:29-30 (HERE as well) whereas another says it was Jubilees 4:21

4. Even AnswersinGenesis (AiG) admits that Augustine thought that everything was created simultaneously and not over the course of six literal 24 hour long days.

And IIRC in his Confessiones ("Confessions") Augustine maintained that the seventh day of creation continues (it has no evening or morning because God sanctified it for everlasting continuance) giving yet another indication that he doesn't think hold that the "days" of creation were literal 24 hour long ones.

5. In Summa Theologica Aquinas also recognized the difference of opinion among the early fathers for the proper interpretation of "days" in Genesis 1.

Your jumping all over the place with silly meaningless Star Trek pictures. ALL the various versions still remains a literal interpretation of Genesis, whether 7 days or seven thousand years. Yes, St, Augustine believed in an instantaneous creation as in the beginning of Genesis, but also believed in a literal form of Genesis with a world flood. ALL believe in a literal Biblical flood, and yes all these various views dominated Christianity up until recent history, but St. Augustine's view of an instantaneous Creation did not get traction, and various literal versions still represents a prevalent view of Christianity of more than 40% of Christians, and over 46% consider evolution to be in conflict with their religious beliefs.

You still have not been very specific in your references concerning any other view than the various forms of literal beliefs in Genesis. There was no version that included any concept comparable to evolution. Broadly citing a Bibliography without specific citations is meaningless.

Also again claims you made like the following lack citations:

Blissfully unaware that many of the contributors to The Fundamentals (IOW, the original "fundamentalists") accepted that the earth was incredibly ancient and a significant number were either open to or accepted evolution.

My references were clear and specific as to what the Church Fathers believed, and you have failed present specific alternatives. The fundamentalist view continued strong throughout history as believed by Martin Luther, Baptists and Calvinists.