Matthew 22 vv 37-40
At the risk of sounding terribly sententious … I think this is rather more important to the matter of being a Christian than any issues about cosmogony. Not that the origins of the Universe aren’t interesting in themselves, of course … but what makes people Christian is whether they live that way, not whether they hold to Biblical literalism.
For the record: I believe God made the Big Bang.
Let me clarify a bit. I’m perfectly willing to accept a rational or scientific descriptive process of nature. I’m not arguing in favor of the young earth theory. What I am saying is that while I accept what science is saying today, I recognize the almost inescapable conclusion that what science says today will probably bear little resemblance to what science says in 100 or 200 years. And I don’t think I know “better” than any scientist about his or her field. I know I’m not a scientist or scientifically-inclined, but perhaps that gives me a valuable perspective on this issue. Oftentimes an expert in any given field does not have enough distance from his subject of expertise to objectively evaluate its context in the wider world. Simply looking at the history of science illustrates that the “truths” scientists took for granted in one era became the butt of jokes in other eras.
Now I’m not saying there is such a thing as scientific truth or that man is incapable of grasping it; what I am saying is that I’m not willing to state with any great certainty that the way science explains the world today (or the creation of the world) will stand the test of time. Yes, I am being “dubious” here, but I think to act any other way is to make the unsound assumption that our level of knowledge today is at such a level that it can’t be fundamentally altered by any new discovery. That, basically, we know pretty much all there is to know.
I don’t think it’s incompatible to accept a rational way of looking at the world without making that assumption.
The fact that the Scripture says that after each day of creation: "and the evening and the morning were the first, second, third, etc. day makes me believe that they were literal six days. But that’s just me. And if Carbon dating is so reliable why have I heard stories about them testing living things with it and having it show them being dead for thousands of years? Who knows, we might find out some day that science doesn’t have all the answers and they’ve misinterpreted some of the information they’ve had.
[qutoe]Renob wrote:
Simply looking at the history of science illustrates that the “truths” scientists took for granted in one era became the butt of jokes in other eras.
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Would you please name one of these “truths,” because I can’t think of anything that would fit your description.
There is a very simple reason why you’ve heard that. Either the people who told you were ignorant of the science of using carbon isotopes for measuring age, or they were deliberately lying to you. If you heard it from a friend, probably the former, but if you heard it from “creation scientists,” it would be the latter. See http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011_3.html .
Doesn’t that imply that God is sort of a Nixonian entity?
“Remember all that stuff I told you before? I said that because you weren’t smart or sophisticated enough to grasp the wholeness of reality. So I fudged the truth a bit, and I pulled some other stuff completely out of my ass, just so you’d have a story you could believe in and wouldn’t go crazy with uncertainty. But I also made you intelligent and curious, and I knew you’d figure it out eventually. Now you have. Sorry I had to feed you a line of bullshit before, but you’re on the right track now. I’m confident you’re smart enough to know the difference between what your own eyes tell you is incontrovertible evidence and a bunch of stories that were created to reassure terrified shepherds. Well, some of you, anyway. Many apologies, but I’m sure you understand.”
Or, in other words:
“This is the operative statement. All previous statements are inoperative.”
Does God have a dog named Checkers?
[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Doesn’t that imply that God is sort of a Nixonian entity?/QUOTE]
Perhaps, if you assume that God dictated each word. Lots and lots of Christians (I’d say “most”, but I can’t back it up) do not believe this to be the case. If you accept that the OT was inspired by God, but written by men, with the understanding of their age, then there is no Nixonian double-time going on.
Alternatively, if you accept that the purpose of scripture is not to describe exactly what happened, but why what-happened happened, again the apparent duplicity on the part of the almighty is resolved.
Anyone who insists that the OT is intended to be a literal description of what happened, **and ** that it was dictated directly by God, would indeed find themselves in the uncomfortable posistion of having Tricky Dick as a Deity! 
Well, okay Dogface. I had just realized I still owed **Kimstu ** a response when I came across yours. You pretty much said what I was going to, but using many fewer words than I would have - thanks.
That reminds me of my personal favorite joke, which ends with the line . . .
“dammit Mom, sometimes you really piss me off!”
So do you believe that scientists are just blowing hot air? I mean, scientists make definitive claims about the way life, planets, stars, galaxies, the universe itself formed. They also make claims about timescales and measure how long it took for speciation to occur or for star systems to form. Are they just unable to inform you and you’re going to have to live your life in ignorance until you’re scuttled off to heaven?
It’s nice that you believe that. Unfortunately you are wrong. All life on earth was most definitely not created in 6 days. Humans and all life you see around you evolved from earlier lifeforms. This is not up for debate: it is fact and no amount of scientific revolution is going to change this observed fact just as no amount of scientific revolution is going to change the observed fact that heat is transfered from a hot body to a cold body.
And if you don’t think evolution can happen where one species evolves into another, or that it’s never been observed, you’re wrong.
Would you care, elfkin, to elaborate on in which parts of Darwinism you don’t fully believe? Are you an objector to current evolutionary theory or the details that Darwin himself worked out?
Objectively, from empirical observations we know it did not take just six human days.
We also know that the global flood wasn’t global in the sense that that the Earth was not covered with water after human beings arrived on the scene.
As Pauli said, “That’s not right, that’s not even wrong”. See above for the observed fact that speciation occurs not within species but in a fashion to allow for biological evolution.
There is no “missing link” problem, as demonstrated in this critique of a film that claimed there was.
Would you care to quantify what “little resemblance” means in your description? I claim that “little resemblance” does not mean that we will discover that life’s diversity did not arise out of evolution or that the universe is expanding over a period of 13.7 billion years to what we see today. Perhaps you know more about how this “little resemblance” will bear itself out?
Or, even better, demonstrate how “little resemblance” occurred in the past. What scientific revolution overturned a basic observational fact? You might say something like the Copernican revolution, but you see, the Copernican revolution only offered an explanation for why we see the stuff in the heavens move around the Earth in the night sky. It did not claim that this observational fact was no longer true.
What are you willing to state with great certainty? Are you willing to state that gravitational models will stand the test of time? How do you arrive at your evaluations other than making WAGs?
I find your condescension to be unwarranted as you freely admit you don’t even have familiarity with the “way science explains the world today”. Of course you can’t state with any great certainty because you don’t understand it. That doesn’t speak to any great truth but merely to your own ignorance.
Are you willing to entertain the notion, lynn, that we might find out some day that your beliefs in a literal Genesis might not have all the answers and that you’ve misinterpreted some of the information that you have? Or don’t you apply with equal fairness your incredulity?
I suppose I could concede that you have a point. It’s just that I and others choose to believe what the Bible says literally about creation because we believe it’s God’s word. And because of that the rest of you seen to think we’re a bunch of stupid people that need to be educated. Some of us look at thing from a whole different perspective that you might not understand. Science isn’t my God.
Me neither. My god is Social Studies.
Not my brother though - his god is PE.
Ahhhh, I see. :eek:
lynn, you are free to believe whatever you want. Far be it from me to tell you what or what not to believe. People believe in all sorts of things. I’m sure there are people who believe that human beings can fly by flapping their arms very quickly. They are wrong, but they are free to believe that.
To be frank, just like the belief in human beings flying by means of arm-flapping, a literal Genesis is just plain wrong. I’m not willing to say that you are stupid or need to be educated. People who are smart and educated hold all sorts of beliefs that are, frankly, empirically incorrect. The fact that literal Genesis is wrong is not up for empirical debate. Evolution as the origin of lifeforms on Earth is true as is a general description of the Big Bang as the model by which the universe exists. End of story.
You can look at nature from any perspective you want to. The fact is that there are some things that are true and there are some things that are not true. It happens that a literal Genesis is not true. No offense to you, lynn, but that’s simply an observational fact like water is made of hydrogen and oxygen bonded together or the conservation of energy.
Allow me to join you on the soapbox.
No offense taken, JS Princeton. 
So you got a different impression from reading the OT? Destroy this, smite that, curse them…the boredom part is kind of a relief.
Science isn’t my God either.
However, it is the most reliable means I have of finding out how His creation works. The Bible is not the only means by which God makes Himself known to us.
Citation? Proof that this is not another of those “I know a guy who heard from a guy that some guy’s cousin’s husband’s brother’s girlfriend’s brother once heard that…” would be nice.
What does the bible say about literal creation? Which of the two orders in Genesis do you accept, Chapter 1 or 2?