Having avoided reviewing this thread, I was unaware that I’d been called out as an authority and “refuted” by another poster. So, ignoring the insults in the latter’s post (as David asked) but quoting the post containing them to discuss it:
Well, I have read material from ICR and something called Answers from Genesis, but you’re right. I’m not interested in deep study of anybody who tries to make the first chapter of the Bible into a cosmology textbook rather than a witness to God’s power and goodness in His act of creation.
As for the “trap,” I’m capable of reviewing rates of sedimentation, average rates of igneous flow, and means of radiometric dating and the possible fallacies they can introduce, and I suggest to you that the evidence of the world that God created suggests an origin somewhat in excess of 4,300,000,000 years ago, with significant multicellular life prevalent somewhere around 750,000,000 years ago. If you care to suggest that He was the sort of trickster god who might plant false evidence to deceive people, that’s your privilege – but I won’t believe it of Him.
He didn’t “wander by our planet” – He caused it and the Universe in which it exists to come into being. And I think it’s well within His capabilities to put together a Divine Plan in which things occur in order, in accordance with natural law, over a long period of time. That would include creating us, caring about each and every one of us, and so on.
Well, the first question I have is Cite?. Where in Scripture does it say that “there was no death before Adam”? Not that he was the first man, or something of that sort, but the exact words you’ve said. Assuming a literal-six-day creation,if God created bacteria on one of the first five days, it would stand to reason that some of them died before Adam was created.
Second, and I’m confident you won’t buy into this but for the benefit of third parties following, there’s some strong textual evidence that the toledoth sections of Genesis – the genealogies linking the main “story” portions – were introduced about the time of the return from Exile by a “Priestly redactor” precisely to link the main accounts – Creation and fall, the Flood, and Abraham and the other patriarchs.
Nope. Christ quoted Genesis. I quoted Genesis. I don’t believe in six literal days. Unlike you, Christ was quite capable of taking a story as a story, not insisting on its literal truth value. I’m fairly sure that he never knew a Samaritan man who came across a Jewish mugging victim on the road to Jericho and gave him a helping hand – but that didn’t stop him from making up the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach us a lesson about inclusion and exclusion, and which God favors (a lesson some Christians might do well to look at, based on some posts I’ve seen elsewhere.)
Second, if God is the God of Creation, and if Creation bears witness to a vast age as it does, then to insist on the manmade doctrine of the literalness of Genesis 1 is to call God a liar. I hate playing this game, but I’m not, you are.
Thanks. I stand for the Bible as truth. I don’t stand for the whole text as a literal history; it neither is nor was intended to be. (You might do well to read a bit on what was considered proper in Classical reportage, as in Greek and Roman writers ascribing speeches to their historical characters well after the event that we know were not taken down verbatim, but which express in strong words the points the characters actually made, presumably in similar but not exact words to those written.
I stand for God’s truth – as found in the Bible and as found in the world He made.
But there’s one more thing you may need to take into account: we have very explicit instructions by the Man Whom we believe to be God Incarnate in human form. And the amount of bile and hatred you’re spewing in defense of Young Earth Creationism is not what He told us to be doing. In His name, I strongly urge you to tone down the polemic language and witness to His love and mercy, as He told us to do.
BTW, I count as close online friends two YEC gentlemen who do obey their Lord and Savior’s instructions about how to deal with others.
