If You Changed From YEC to an 'Old Earth' View, Would You Post Your Story Here...

[KBertsche]

I have become a YEC in the last two years. Before this an OEC.
...
How else could molecules in our cells work unguided. God would have to be active in all things. He may be but I allow for the possibility that He jump started the process.

This illustrates what has been mentioned recently in other threads: YEC's tend to have a deistic view of nature. Many have uncritically accepted the view that nature runs on its own, apart from God's activity. This is unbiblical (see, for example, Col. 1:17, Psalm 104, Job 38-42).

[franktalk]

This illustrates what has been mentioned recently in other threads: YEC's tend to have a deistic view of nature. Many have uncritically accepted the view that nature runs on its own, apart from God's activity. This is unbiblical (see, for example, Col. 1:17, Psalm 104, Job 38-42).

God intervenes all of the time. Our perception of nature is what we are talking about. And yes God has stepped in at His whim and changed whatever He wanted to. The discussion of science and nature has to be coupled with the creation. God is the one who defined what nature is in the first place. I do not reconcile the Bible, I reconcile science.

One just needs to look at the ZPE to see God hold the entire universe together every instant of time. If God went on vacation we would cease to exist.

[grmorton]

If you changed from YEC to an 'old earth' view, would you post your story here, with links to articles or sites that helped convince you - of either the Day-Age View, Theistic Evolution, the Framework Hypothesis, or some other theistic old-earth view.

I feel for the pain you felt in your change. Here is my story from http://home.entouch.net/dmd/transform.htm


I became a Christian in my sophomore year of college. The people who had led me to the Lord immediately began my discipleship. They taught me to evangelize and they taught me what they felt a Christian should believe. But most importantly they were a loving family of believers which was a welcome oasis for someone like me whose home life had been less than familial. Thus, when I was told that Christians must believe in a young-earth and a global flood, I went along willingly. I believed. Being a physics major in college I had not taken any geology courses. I knew there were physics problems, but I thought I could to solve them.

When I graduated from college, physicists were unemployable since NASA had just laid a bunch of them off. I did graduate work in philosophy and then decided to leave school to support my growing family. After six months, I found work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company. Within a year, I was processing seismic data for a major oil company.

This was where I first became exposed to the problems geology presented to the idea of a global flood. I would see extremely thick (30,000 feet) sedimentary layers and wonder how the flood could have deposited all that sediment and still given time for footprints to be formed if it was all deposited in one year. One could follow beds with footprints from the surface down to those depths where they were covered by such thicknesses of sediment that much time would have been required. I would see buried mountains which had experienced more than 10 thousands of feet of erosion, which required more time than a single year. Yet, my belief system required that the sediments in those buried mountains had to have been deposited by the flood. I would see karsts, (sinkholes due to limestone erosion) and salt sandwiched in the middle of the geologic column (supposedly during the middle of the flood). Yet the flood waters would have been saturated with limestone and incapable of dissolving lime. And salt can only be removed from the ocean waters by evaporation. It was inconceivable that salt could be deposited during the Flood. It became clear that more time was needed than the global flood would allow. But my faith in the young-earth interpretation told me that the data wasn’t to be believed.

Over the next several years I struggled to understand how the geologic data I worked with everyday could be fit into a Biblical perspective. I published 20+ items in the Creation Research Society Quarterly toward that goal. I would listen to ICR, have discussions with people like Harold Slusher, Duane Gish, Steve Austin, Tom Barnes and with some of their graduates that I had hired. Nothing worked to explain what I saw.

In order to get closer to the data and know it better, with the hope of finding a solution, I changed subdivisions of my work in 1980. I left seismic processing and went into seismic interpretation where I would work more closely with geologic data. My horror only increased. The data I was seeing at work, was not agreeing with what I had been taught as a Christian. Doubts about what I was writing and teaching began to grow. No one could give me a model which allowed me to unite into one cloth what I believed on Sunday and what I was forced to believe by the data Monday through Friday.

Unfortunately, my fellow young earth creationists were not willing to listen to the problems. In general they were not interested in discussing the difficulties and they did not want to read any material that contradicted their cherished position. But then I too was often unwilling to face the data or read books like Kitchner’s Abusing Science, which argued against young-earth creationism. I would have eagerly isolated myself from geologic data, but my job would not allow it. I preferred darkness of self-deception to the light of truth. Yet, day after day, my job forced me to confront that awful data. And to make matters worse, I was viewed by my fellow young-earth creationists as less than pure for trying to discuss or solve the problems.

By 1986, the growing doubts about the ability of the widely accepted creationist viewpoints to explain the geologic data led to a nearly 10 year withdrawal from publication. My last young-earth paper was entitled “Geologic Challenges to a Young-earth”, which I presented as the first paper in the First International Conference on Creationism. I showed the geologic and seismic data I was working with.
The talk was not well received. The reaction to the pictures, seismic data, and the logic disgusted me. They were more interested in what I sounded like than in the data! One person, claiming to have worked in the oil industry, came to the stage to challenge me. His challenge was insignificant and his claim of having worked in the industry was false. I was bothered by a Christian making false claims.
It appeared that the more I questions I raised, the more they questioned my Christianity. When telling one friend of my difficulties with young-earth creationism and geology, he told me that I had obviously been brain-washed by my geology professors. When I told him that I had never taken a geology course, he then said I must be saying this in order to hold my job. Never would he consider that I might really believe the data. This attitude that the messenger of bad news must be doubted amazed me. And it convinced me that too many of my fellow Christians were not interested in truth but only that I should conform to their theological position. To all intents and purposes I was through with young-earth creationists (not ism yet) because I knew that they didn't care about the data.

During the next 10 years I published little of value for the creation/evolution area. I was still a young-earth creationist but I didn’t know how to solve the problems. In the late 1980s very long baseline interferometry measurements disproved most of my young-earth articles by measuring the slow drift of the continents showing that much time would be required to move the continents to their present position.
Eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationISM. Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology had turned out to be true. I took a poll of all 8 of the graduates from ICR’s school who had gone into the oil industry and were working for various companies. I asked them one question.

"From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true?"

That is a very simple question. One man, who worked for a major oil company, grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said 'No!'

A very close friend that I had hired, after hearing the question, exclaimed, "Wait a minute. There has to be one!" But he could not name one. No one else could either.

Being through with creationism, I was almost through with Christianity. I was thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that if the earth were not young and the flood not global, then the Bible was false. I was on the very verge of becoming an atheist. During that time, I re-read a book I had reviewed prior to its publication. It was Alan Hayward's Creation/Evolution (Triangle, 1985). Although I had reviewed it prior to its publication in 1985, I hadn't been ready for the views he expressed. He presented a wonderful “Days of Proclamation” view which pulled me back from the edge of atheism. Although I believe Alan applied it to the earth in an unworkable fashion, applied differently, his view had the power to unite the data with the Scripture. That is what I have done with my views. Without that I would now be an atheist. There is much in Alan's book I agree with and disagree with, but his book was very important in keeping me in the faith. While his book may not have changed the debate totally, it did change my life.

It was my lack of knowledge that allowed me to go along willingly and become a young-earth creationist. It was isolation from contradictory data, a fear of contradictory data and a strong belief in the young-earth interpretation that kept me there for a long time. The biggest lesson I have learned in this journey is to read the works of those with whom you disagree. God is not afraid of the data.

Glenn R. Morton

glennmorton@entouch.net

[kuboes1831]

Morton

It is a great pity that you are not an honest man

[grmorton]

Morton

It is a great pity that you are not an honest man

Kuboes,

Care to elaborate as to what I am dishonest about? I am curious. YOu are the only person who claims that and when I find you to be the lone outlier of feed back, I think I can afford to ignore you unless you chose to explain a bit futher.

Also. Care to answer the question about whether or not a Seneca Lad could claim that his god accommodated his message to the lad's ancestors false science, but that the theology was still true?

No, of course not. That question you won't ever answer, and I bet you won't answer the question about what you think I am dishonest about. You just like yipping at my heels like some chihuahua yappy dog.

But, I am glad that all you have to do is to think of me. hugs and kisses

[ApologiaPhoenix]

I just found the evidence for an Old Earth convincing and that it could still fit in with sound scriptural exegesis.

[wiseman]

How old does a Jew think the earth is?

[Mark F]

Glenn Morton, thank you for your story. Although I'm not a scientist myself, I have traveled a somewhat similar path. It's a shame that so many Christians see the young Earth doctrine so essential that to deny it is to effectively deny the Bible. (Do these same people reject the Bible by denying that the Earth is established on pillars, as Ps 75:3 says? Oh, you say it's figurative? So why couldn't the creation days be figurative as well?)

In fact some of the most influential Christians (such as C.S. Lewis, so loved by apologists) never believed in a literal reading of the creation story. And I agree that claiming the data supports a young earth is a major disadvantage for the gospel today. Framework theory appears quite promising.

The only way I could accept the Earth being 6,000 years old would be to assume that God planted a huge amount of deceptive evidence (then we're moving from science to theology). Some claim that 2 Thess 2:11 could point to a deceptive appearance of age.

How old does a Jew think the earth is?

In fact, many (if not most) conservative and Orthodox Jews accept Old Earth, although they continue to revere the Torah as divinely inspired. It seems to be much harder for Christians, for some reason. (I read somewhere that there was an old Jewish tradition that stated the age of the universe with a surprising precision as confirmed by current knowledge.)

[age2age]

You have stumbled and erred. There may be a way to reconcile the young cosmos of the Bible with big bang science. I think I have found it. Truly.

[jds22]

My journey resembles Grmortons.

I was taught that you either believe Genesis and YEC or you can't call yourself a Christian. So once I stopped believing YEC, I was definately agnostic heading towards atheism.

IMHO, YEC dogmatism is doing a lot of harm.

[age2age]

YEC dogmatism is doing a lot of harm.

However, if one could show you a means to achieve the vast universe we know today in mere 1000s of years; arrive at the surface of last scattering for CMB photons in a rapid .13 seconds; achieve a present CMB temperature of 2.73 K and a Hubble parameter of ~ 72; further, demonstrate that Day 4 stars were created at a redshift of ~ 26 (very much within star-birth parameters); then reveal the means by which the planet is simultaneously young in ordinal time yet intrinsically very old in matter makeup, thereby explaining how it was thoroughly radioactively cooled within the first 24 hours of existence; moreover, show you where all the antimatter of the big bang ended up; and finally, demonstrate how and why the universe is accelerating, would you perhaps at least give space to the idea that the Bible just might truly contain the history of not only the world but also the entire universe system?

[Catholicity]

Gladly, I was raised in a fundy environment (Southern Baptist) and my Christian School used the A Beka and Bob Jones Cirriculum. And of course I attended an AIG Conference or two at a different Baptist Church. However, both sets of Grandparents were not YEC and my Parents did not seem to care to much about the age of the earth, even though they were YEC. To them it was more important that Jesus came died, was buried and rose from the dead. We had some field trips, which took us to the local planetariums (not so "fundy" and some nature camps which taught us about the rock and water cycle from an evolutionary stand point, as well as the ages of trees and how to determine them. Although I once watched a teacher cry over how worried she was about her brother becoming an OEC in college, she was worried about his soul. I said nothing. In sixth grade I went to public school, where I learned a different perspective on science, and I have to admit, it was a bit better. I liked thinking and reasoning a little better. then back to the same Christian school in 7th grade. Another AIG conference. Well at the end of 7th grade, I did an Astronomy paper. I borrowed some astronomy magazines, some Natgeo magazines, emailed a few questions to my friend's father (who worked at NASA) and off I went. In my 13 year old mind, I had a hard time reconciling the andromeda galaxies distance with the idea that the universe was 10000 years old. so I conferenced with my dad at this point. He explained to me some theories. I did a little reviewing of the Bible, and decided the Bible and decided the Universe was probably old but the earth was young. That is until I went to eighth grade at a charter school. I first heard the theory of God's time, from some Christian friends. I looked more into it. I had always had a fascination with rocks, volcanoes, and plate tectonics. I thought, if the plates are moving this far per year, and I was taught in fifth grade out of the Abeka books that Pangea once existed, and we learned the rock cycle, what's missing? I know Volcanic islands exist, Hawaii is forever getting new land, rocks form this way.....whats wrong with this 6000 year picture. So the earth had to be older than I had been taught.. Maybe life was was 6000 or 10000 years old? but the earth was definately millions of years old. Geologically, things just made no sense other wise. Well, by the time I got to biology and World History, it was clear to me that man was the younger of all the species that had ever walked the earth. this was in 10th grade. YEC made no sense any more I new about the elements Carbon, Diamond formation, Paleontology, even though I don't know all the specifics yet and maybe I never will, it just becomes clear that from biblica accounts, fossil, geologic records, and astronomy, YEC has no merit other than God created the earth

[lee_merrill]

I just couldn't believe that God put all this evidence in of an old earth / universe, such as the fractions of radioactive elements that match billions of years, younger galaxies at farther distances, such as microwave radiation at the right temperature after the estimated years after the Big Bang, etc.

And reading some Old Earth authors such as Hugh Ross gave me reason to believe the view is compatible with Scripture, not to mention more scientific evidence.

Also, C.S. Lewis, my favorite author, was an old-earther, so it seemed worth considering.

Blessings,
Lee

[grmorton]

If you changed from YEC to an 'old earth' view, would you post your story here, with links to articles or sites that helped convince you - of either the Day-Age View, Theistic Evolution, the Framework Hypothesis, or some other theistic old-earth view.

Here is my story:

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/gstory.htm

For years I struggled to understand how the geologic data I worked with everyday could be fit into a Biblical perspective. Being a physics major in college I had no geology courses. Thus, as a young Christian, when I was presented with the view that Christians must believe in a young-earth and global flood, I went along willingly. I knew there were problems but I thought I was going to solve them. When I graduated from college with a physics degree, physicists were unemployable since NASA had just laid a bunch of them off. I did graduate work in philosophy and then decided to leave school to support my growing family. Even after a year, physicists were still unemployable. After six months of looking, I finally found work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company. Within a year, I was processing seismic data for Atlantic Richfield.

This was where I first became exposed to the problems geology presented to the idea of a global flood. I would see extremely thick (30,000 feet) sedimentary layers. One could follow these beds from the surface down to those depths where they were covered by vast thicknesses of sediment. I would see buried mountains which had experienced thousands of feet of erosion, which required time. Yet the sediments in those mountains had to have been deposited by the flood, if it was true. I would see faults that were active early but not late and faults that were active late but not early. I would see karsts and sinkholes (limestone erosion) which occurred during the middle of the sedimentary column (supposedly during the middle of the flood) yet the flood waters would have been saturated in limestone and incapable of dissolving lime. It became clear that more time was needed than the global flood would allow.(See http://www.seg.org/publications/geoa...o6105r1336.pdf for an article showing an example of a deeply buried karst. For a better but bigger (3.4 meg) version of that paper see http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications..._pdf/NG4-1.PDF

One also finds erosional canyons buried in the earth. These canyons would require time to excavate, just like the time it takes to erode the Grand Canyon. This picture was downloaded from a site which is now gone from the web. It was http://ic.ucsc.edu/~casey/eart168/3D...Deltain3d1.gif (see below)



I worked hard over the next few years to solve these problems. I published 30+ items in the Creation Research Society Quarterly. I would listen to ICR, have discussions with people like Slusher, Gish, Austin, Barnes and also discuss things with some of their graduates that I had hired.

In order to get closer to the data and know it better, with the hope of finding a solution, I changed subdivisions of my work in 1980. I left seismic processing and went into seismic interpretation where I would have to deal with more geologic data. My horror at what I was seeing only increased. There was a major problem; the data I was seeing at work, was not agreeing with what I had been taught as a Christian. Doubts about what I was writing and teaching began to grow. Unfortunately, my fellow young earth creationists were not willing to listen to the problems. No one could give me a model which allowed me to unite into one cloth what I believed on Sunday and what I was forced to believe by the data Monday through Friday. I was living the life of a double-minded man--believing two things.

By 1986, the growing doubts about the ability of the widely accepted creationist viewpoints to explain the geologic data led to
a nearly 10 year withdrawal from publication. My last young-earth paper was entitled Geologic Challenges to a Young-earth, which I presented as the first paper in the First International Conference on Creationism. It was not well received. Young-earth creationists don't like being told they are wrong. The reaction to the pictures, seismic data, the logic disgusted me. They were more interested in what I sounded like than in the data!

John Morris came to the stage to challenge me. He claimed to have been in the oil industry. I asked him what oil company he had worked for. I am going to let an account of this published in the Skeptical Inquirer in late 86 or early 87. It was written by Robert Schadewald. He writes,

"John Morris went to the microphone and identified himself as a petroleum geologist. He questioned Morton's claim that pollen grains are found in salt formations, and accused Morton of sounding like an anticreationist, raising more problems than his critics could respond to in the time available. Morris said that the ICR staff is working on these problems all the time. He told Morton to quit raising problems and start solving them. "Morton chopped him off at the ankles. Two questions, said Morton: 'What oil company did you work for?' Well, uh, actually Morris never worked for an oil company, but he once taught petroleum engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Second, How old is the Earth?' 'If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning.' Morton then said that he had hired several graduates of Christian Heritage College, and that all of them suffered severe crises of faith. The were utterly unprepared to face the geologic facts every petroleum geologist deals with on a daily basis. Morton neglected to add that ICR is much better known for ignoring or denying problems than dealing with them."

It appeared that the more I questions I raised, the more they questioned my theological purity. When telling one friend of my difficulties with young-earth creationism and geology, he told me that I had obviously been brain-washed by my geology professors. When I told him that I had never taken a geology course, he then said I must be saying this in order to hold my job. Never would he consider that I might really believe the data. Since then this type of treatment has become expected from young-earthers. I have been called nearly everything under the sun but they don't deal with the data I present to them. Here is a list of what young-earthers have called me in response to my data: 'an apostate,'(Humphreys) 'a heretic'(Jim Bell although he later apologised like the gentleman he is) 'a compromiser'(Henry Morris) "absurd", "naive", "compromising", "abysmally ignorant", "sloppy", "reckless disregard", "extremely inaccurate", "misleading", "tomfoolery" and "intentionally deceitful"(John Woodmorappe) 'like your father, Satan' (Carl R. Froede--I am proud to have this one because Jesus was once said to have been of satan also.) 'your loyality and commitment to Jesus Christ is shaky or just not truly genuine' (John Baumgardner 12-24-99 [Merry Christmas]) "[I] have secretly entertained suspicions of a Trojan horse roaming behind the lines..." Royal Truman 12-28-99

Above I say that I with drew from publishing for 10 years. I need to make one item clear. It is true that I published a couple of items in the late 80s. The truth is that these were an edited letter exchange I had with George Howe. When George approached me about the Mountain Building symposium, I told him I didn't want to write it. He said that was ok he would write it, give it to me for ok and then publish it. Since it was merely splicing a bunch of letters together, it was my words, but George's editorship that made that article. To all intents and purposes I was through with young-earth creationist (not ism yet) because I knew that they didn't care about the data.

But eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationISM. Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked in the oil industry. I asked them one question.

"From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true? ,"

That is a very simple question. One man, Steve Robertson, who worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said 'No!' A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing the question, exclaimed, "Wait a minute. There has to be one!" But he could not name one. I can not name one. No one else could either. One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the last time I talked to him.

And being through with creationism, I very nearly became through with Christianity. I was on the very verge of becoming an atheist. During that time, I re-read a book I had reviewed prior to its publication. It was Alan Hayward's Creation/Evolution. Even though I had reviewed it 1984 prior to its publication in 1985, I hadn't been ready for the views he expressed. He presented a wonderful Days of Proclamation view which pulled me back from the edge of atheism. Although I believe Alan applied it to the earth in an unworkable fashion, his view had the power to unite the data with the Scripture, if it was applied differently. That is what I have done with my views. Without that I would now be an atheist. There is much in Alan's book I agree with and much I disagree with but his book was very important in keeping me in the faith. While his book may not have changed the debate totally yet, it did change my life.

[Mark F]

(I read somewhere that there was an old Jewish tradition that stated the age of the universe with a surprising precision as confirmed by current knowledge.

It seems to have been this one:

"Another, Nechunya ben HaKanah, a 1st century Kabbalist, asserted that if you knew how to use the 42 letter name for God you could decipher a lengthy time between the creation of the universe and of man. He estimated the age of the Universe at 15.3 billion years, some 2000 years ago, the very age modern astrophysics have just arrived at."

(Via http://www.fixedearth.com/kabbala%20I.htm, an extremely anti-science website.)

The exact method that ben HaKanah applied to the "42 letter name for God" is unknown. In any case, the precision of his estimate - at a time when no one would speak of millions of years, let alone billions of years - is quite astounding.

Disclaimer: I do not endorse any form of Kabbalah and reject many if not most doctrines generally accepted by Kabbalists. In fact it is questionable if any Jewish scholar of antiquity or the early middle ages can be labeled a "Kabbalist", as the actual Kabbalah emerged much later.

A modern Orthodox Jew who has harmonized Genesis with the currently accepted age of the universe is Gerald Schroeder. He claims that given the theory of relativity and the speed of time, six days from God's point of view would correspond to about 16 billion years from a human point of view.