Note to Lynn: Today we felt it important to postpone our post on the significance of the palm fronds on Palm Sunday due to a significant comment. We will answer this question next Friday. For our readers, we now post Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.On Fridays we deviate from our typical posts and answer questions about the Bible and faith. Today, we interrupt this schedule for the following.
Yesterday we discussed the "Neanderthal" (sorry, I couldn't help myself) response of Reformed Theological Seminary's acceptance of Professor Waltke's resignation. The mere fact that he felt obliged to submit it is ridiculous and will subject evangelicalism to needless criticism and derision. Already anti-Christian blogs are gleefully proclaiming the stupidity of Christians in regards to this action and what it represents about Christianity's viewpoint on scientific evidence.
Here is one such comment from freethinker.co.uk which was posted on April 12 entitled Hell Hath No Fury Like Fundies Scorned: "It was Dr Waltke who wanted the video removed, Janstince. The reaction was so hostile that he has been forced to recant. Who says the Church has moved on since Galileo’s day?"
"Orion's Belt" posted a response to one comment on our blog post from yesterday. This response was not meant to be a criticism of the commenter. We are acquainted with Orion's Belt and we can assure you that he is a kind and humble person. He merely used the comment to respond to common concerns that some have for the vast majority Christian scientists who are theistic evolutionists or believe in an Old Earth.
We respect the comments of "annonymous" and hope (s)he will continue to comment. In fact, we greatly hope (s)he will respond to the comment. Your comments are valued and respected.
However, Orion's Belt, now to be called OB, wrote an amazing response and we did not wish it to be buried in a comment section.We are also including a correction he made to Dee's response to carbon dating. Please refer to yesterday's post to read the surrounding comments. OB-you have a God given talent in explaining this stuff to us lay people. TWW prays that one day you will have a platform to debate this in a less obscure forum.
Hi anon, some of your points make a certain amount of sense, but many do not and represent the kind of reasoning that creates much of the problem we see in this debate. As I respond, please keep in mind I am not singling you out: I see these kinds of arguments all the time. I only ask you and others to think carefully about my response:
1) The big bang is a name for an event that is the best explanation for the data we see. However, the BB is not an ‘explosion’. It is essentially ‘creation ex nihilo’ An infinitely dense singularity suddenly and for no known reason (God decided it was time to create the universe) left that state and began the process of forming this universe. It began is a quantum quark soup of impossible to imagine heat and energy, and from it formed (magically, inexplicably to the naturalits) just the precise balance of properties, characteristics and dimensions so as to allow this universe to be. IOW, the big bang, if one understands it, is almost a perfect map to the openning verses of Genesis 1.
2) you said “I have always said that this issue is just like the resurrection. The naturalist denies the resurrection and says that bodies die and science doesn’t allow for bodies to come back to life. So, the case is closed.”
The issue of YE/OE is nothing at all like the Resurrection scenario you list. It is really the inverse. Here is why. The issues that surround the YE/OE debate are not issues that relate to the belief in miracles. YE/OE/TE Christians for the most part all believe God can, has, is, and will do miracles. A Miracle is a breaking of natural law, God stepping in and causing to happen that which would not normally be possible by natural processes. Science only tells us about what can happen as the result of natural processes. So then, science has nothing to say about if a Miracle is possible. Thus, when a scientist who is a Naturalist in philosophy says the Resurrection could not have happened, he is speaking philosophically, not as a scientist.
What science can do is tell us if a claimed miracle is consistent with the evidence. So if a fellow walks into a room and tells us he was blind but now can see, science can examine his former medical records and see that he once was blind, and can conduct tests to see if he now can see. If he can’t see, well then, the data conflicts with his claim of a miracle. But if he can, then the data is consistent with his claim of a miracle.
With the Resurrection – the data is consistent with the claimed miracle. There is no body, no bones. The Roman gaurds were very unlikely to have let his disciples steal the body, the stone was too heavy for them to quietly roll it away. Christ was too badly wounded to have freed himself or likely recovered. Science cannot say anything about the Resurrection, except that if it happened, it was a Miracle.
OTOH, this is NOT the case within the YE/OE debate. Some Christians claim as certain reading of Genesis 1 is the correct one, and that reading says that God created the universe in just 6 days, 6000 years ago. Yet the evidence is without exception NOT consistent with that claim. The only consistent explanation then is that God made the universe with an almost infinite amount of misleading history so as for it to appear so perfectly like it had formed over billions of years by natural processes as to be indistinguishable from a universe that did form over billions of years by natural processes. That is, in the case of the Universe being 6000 years old, we have a blind man claiming he was miraculously healed but who can’t see the broad side of a barn.
3) You said “but because we believe in a God who created a natural process and can and has transcended it, we have to say that we don’t know how He did that.”
And I would point back to my comments above and remind you that God is a God of truth, and that the scripture tells us that the Heavens declare his glory, and that the natural mind can from creation draw natural revelation of certain of His basic attributes.
If the history we see in the universe itself is a fiction, then the God who made the universe is a fiction writer. This would not be a very good thing. For example, far away and apparently long ago in our neighboring galaxy a star exploded. Now as we observe the light radiating away from that star, it is traveling at the very same speed we observe light traveling here. Further, as we observe the outworking of natural processes like radioactive decay in the gas cloud created by the explosion, the progress at the very same rates we observe here. But this star in this neighboring galaxy is 168,000 light years away. Which means the light from the explosion, which reached us in 1987, left over 168,000 years ago! If the universe is 6000 years old, that explosion never occurred. The light that we see echoing through the surrounding gas clouds never made the journey we see it making. The radioactive elements formed in the explosion and decaying before our eyes never existed. Its all a fiction.
And this story is repeated over and over again, across the universe, and in our backyard where the scars of massive meteor impacts are found all over our planet and our moon. For the YE to be true, these all never happened. For them to have really occured in the last 6000 years (and geological constraints relative to the sediments the penetrate and are buried in relative to a theory of a global flood imply they all must have occured in that time frame in the YE hypothesis), we simply would not exist. The largest of these is almost 200 miles across and in South Africa no less.
Basically – all of these major impacts simply can’t be the real leftovers of a real event if the world is only 6000 years old. They too are fictions.
But I could go on for page after page, ALL the data when properly understood is only consistent with the conclusion the Earth is old. And so God wrote a fiction when he made the Earth, or we don’t understand what He is really telling us in Genesis 1. There is no middle ground of ‘maybe we just are not interpreting the data correctly’ – not if you know what the data really is.
An example I use is that of a puzzle being put together. At first, sure, you might not know what the puzzle is about. But there comes a point where enough of the pieces are in place that the only thing additional work does is fill in the details. We are far, far, far past that point in terms of determining how old the Earth and Universe are.
4) you said: ” It had to be myth. It had to be man’s way of trying to understand God.
Problem is – that “myth” was carried from Genesis 1-12 eventually all the way through the NT and the claims of Christ, himself. All the Bible is a story. It’s all myth based on man’s understanding. Jesus’ ethical teaching is about all we have left in Christianity after the “husk” of the Bible is discarded.”
This will be my final point. No, the early chapters of Genesis being different that what we thought they were does not in any way imply they are merely man made myth, devoid of the truth of God.
Remember, Professor Waltke is a believer in the inerrancy of scripture. Yet he is a Theistic Evolutionist! How can this be??!!
The way this can be is if We have misundertood God’s mode of revelation. We certainly have done this before. Take yourself back to the time of Christ. Everybody is looking for the coming Messiah King. They’d read the scriptures, over and over, yet they’d missed the parts about the suffering servant. And many missed Messiah when He came. Take next time of Galileo, when mens knoweldge of the cosmos was such that many thought the scripture taught that the Earth was fixed, that the sun stars and planets where in a fixed dome above the Earth which rotated about it. Indeed, if you read in the Hebrew the text, there is nothing there to counter such a notion – unless one knows enough about the creation to see that these words may just be phenomenal descriptions of sky and earth. Which is what the church later concluded was the case. But Galileo spent the rest of his life in house arrest because Men were so convinced their understanding of scripture could not possibly be wrong that some even refused to look through Galileo’s telescope.
It God’s revelation in Genesis 1 is not a technical description of how he made the world, but rather a polemic against the gods of Egypt written in common language, then we have spent an awful lot of time making fools of ourselves trying to prove this first chapter is something God never intended it to be. Further, if we have once again based our reading of scripture on the Idea God overrides the natural knowledge of the writer in all areas when teaching spiritual truth, then we once again fall into the trap the produced the Galileo affair.
Even Calvin understood God spoke through the prophets in the common language, in ways that could be understood by those listening. For example, Peter’s crude greek is not fixed to look like Luke’s almost perfect, educated greek. Neither are references to the common notion of the day the sky was a firm dome removed when Job’s friends ask if he can beat out the sky making it like a cast mirror.
The Early Church Father’s could be forgiven this mistake as they argued what form the ‘firmament might take to prevent the waters from rolling off (Basil). Perhaps even the RCC could be forgiven the arguments they had of the fixity of the Earth, or its centrality. But do we, who can look at Palsm 90:4 where it tells us straight up time for God is not like time for us (a thousand years is as a day, or even a watch in the night), we who can see the mistakes of Augustine and Basil on the firmness of the sky, or the bishops of Rome on the fixity of the Earth, do we still really think we can derive from scripture a correct understanding of the history and structure of the universe when that is NOT its purpose, and when every human attempt to do so without first understanding what the reality of nature was has failed – to the shame of the church?!
I know what the answer to that question is for me. And I also know that the scripture is true, it is the word of God, given us so that we can come to understand Him. But let us “rightly divide” that word. Let us be humble in our approach, realizing we are but flesh. And most of all, let us learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before us.
Zeta
Dee,
A small correction for future reference. Carbon dating is actually a very useful dating method, and with modern calibrations and AMS detectors more accurate than ever. But Carbon dating has always had a limited dating range – right now to about 40,000 Years before the Present.
What has gone the way of the dinosaurs is the need to make assumptions about initial parent/daughter ratios in methods like Uranium/Lead. Scientist now use what are called ‘isochrons’ which is simple terms allow the determination both of the suitability of a sample for dating and what the initial parent/daughter ratios were, removing a great deal of the uncertainty previously associated with those methods.
Zeta