Sure, there’s misdating. But you work with the most up-to-date evidence. You can’t really work under the assumption that at some point what is currently known now will be shown to be incorrect in the future, because if we do, we have to apply that across the board.
Not that I would attempt to argue with Jack Chick.
Philip Gosse presented, in his book Omphalos, a theory that, just as the First Man, Adam, had a navel even though he was not born, so, an instant after the catastrophic act of creation, the Earth presented the appearance of having existed for millions of years. Gosse’s book was not well received even by religious types.
In Terry Pratchett’s “Strata” (a diskworld but not the diskworld) the world builders plant fossils to make their worlds look old.
One of many problems is that if God told us how old the world is in the Bible, why did he feel compel to be misleading in the rocks?
Yeah, I know, we can’t understand the mind of god.
My brother is offended by the very mention of the word “Evolution.”
His older daughter is an Old Testament hardcore type who believes that wives should be submissive and obedient to the hubbies and pop out lots of kids because there’s no such thing as overpopulation.
I don’t know what the hell kind of church they went to, but they are certainly have closed themselves off to any other kind of knowledge or facts.
That just makes her fitter than the rest of us. :eek:
Fun fact: you know the popular depiction of Tyrannosaurs chowing down on Apatosaurus (or “Brontosaurus”) or Stegosaurus? Chronologically Tyrannosaurus is closer to us than it is those others species (about 60 million vs. 80 million). Some species are still around since the “dinosaur times,” especially “primitive” plants. Cockroaches are from the Tyrannosaurus era or even older, depending on how you fudge the definition.
Floating point math.
How far back is the end of the Ice Age?
The Genesis accounts of being driven out of Eden and the Great Flood could be contemporary accounts passed down orally of Ice Cap meltwater filling up what is now the Persian Gulf and Black Sea, respectively.
Here’s a meltwater timeline over the past couple thousand years
I attend church quite alot really and have studied this issue to. Look, I’m not going to argue evolutionary biology since its not my area. The OP was interested in views of a supposed “10,000 year old earth” and I presented mine. Agree or not. I feel there have been alot of things that happened in the past and until the day they invent time travel it will still be a matter of guesswork. Both sides are trying as you say to “square the circles” meaning fit what they see into their personal beliefs.
Quite frankly though, I cannot see how anyone can study biology and the complex systems out there (our eyes and ears for example) and think that evolution alone was the answer.
So an invisible spirit that created Itself is the *more realistic *answer?
I don’t see an exponent. In any case even in floating point 2 + 2 = 4.If you want fractions, or very large numbers, that is another story.
In any case the very first problem I had in numerical analysis was measuring how far off a fractional representation was.
Thanks for the reply Urbanredneck.
Just to clarify though, there have been a lot of threads dedicated to the evolution vs. creationist debate. This isn’t one of them. Rather, the topic relates to the sources of the belief that the earth is 10,000 years old. So far the answer has been, “It’s taught in the pews and Christian radio also plays a role.”
As I understand you, you are saying that your beliefs arise from church attendance as well as some study of the subject. Fair enough.
Hijacks regarding the substance of the issue are inevitable and tolerated by the OP, especially since we are on page 3. But they are hijacks.
[Heh: hijack!] 1. The go-to website for creationist/evolutionary debate is http://talkorigins.org/.
It looks like there is quite a plethora of different creationist scenarios and that each individual is encouraged to make up their own explanations defending on which scientific facts they’re willing to accept and OTOH how far they’re willing to bend the Bible.
So in addition to “classic” YEC, you get Old Earthers who think that each “kind” of living thing was specially created over long period of time (perhaps with some subsequent “micro-evolution”) and those who would accept evolution as read until you get to modern humans who alone were specially created within the last 10,000 years.
These are two very different scenarios and I doubt the creationist community is doing much to debunk one and embrace the other.
Urbanredneck, you weren’t quite clear as to where you think evolution came into play prior to the arrival of modern humans. Care to elaborate?
No bending necessary. Attached is a list of over 30 religious organizations (ok, maybe a third are non-Christian) supporting the teaching of evolution in the schools. http://ncse.com/media/voices/religion
So… Just hypothetically, if I kneecap you with a baseball bat, is it just guesswork what happened until we invent time travel? Scientists are not trying to fit what they see into their personal beliefs. They examine the evidence and try to find explanations that fit all available evidence, is contradicted by none of the available evidence, and makes the least assumptions. Given the evidence that we have, there is no other theory that even comes close to the scientific viability of the modern theory of evolution. People are welcome to provide one which makes less assumptions or which matches the evidence better - there’s a fairly quick and easy nobel prize to be had for doing so, if you can do it - but so far, nobody has. Nobody has even pointed out a significant flaw in the theory! There’s very little actual guesswork involved - the evidence is fairly strong for almost all statements you can make about evolution.
Why not? Personal incredulity is not a scientific argument by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the funny thing about this is, virtually every time an example is given of something that “could not have possibly evolved” - something that’s irreducibly complex by Behe’s definition - scientists have taken the time to look it over and explain, “Actually, here’s how it could have evolved”. In the case of the eye, the explanation is not only “here’s how it could have evolved”, but also “here’s how we know it evolved that way”. We can be incredibly specific in which steps were taken, and we’ve also found modern examples of offshoots on the evolutionary tree that display those steps, more or less exactly in the phylogeny you’d expect!
Well, we can prove it false via two ways:
We can see if the story is internally inconsistent - this would imply that either it changed over time in significant ways, or it wasn’t accurate to begin with. This is trivial; Genesis contains two very different creation accounts stacked on top of each other.
Or, we can see if the story comports with what we know about reality. This is, again, trivial - the oldest rocks we’ve dated go back billions of years; the entire concept of Adam and Eve is completely debunked by elementary population genetics in numerous ways (we can observe genetic bottlenecks; 2 individuals simply do not have the genetic diversity to promulgate an entire species; we can trace our lineage back to ape-like ancestors of different species); plants did not exist before the sun did and neither did the earth…
Yes, except creation also happens to contain a “how”, which is integral to answering its “why”. Never mind that it’s “why” is pulled completely out of its ass (if we’re playing that game, the “why” for cosmology is “because the great green arkleseizure sneezed”, and the “why” for that is “because I said so”). Oh, and the “how” is almost fractally wrong.
By way of comparison, 17% of those in Britain believe in young earth creationism (YEC), while 2/3 consider evolution the most likely explanation for the origins of human life. http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/FaithandDarwin.pdf
In Canada, 22% plonk for YEC, relative to about 40% in the US. A nice chart comparing beliefs in evolution across 34 countries is at the National Geographic website. The US is 2nd to last: Turkey disagrees most with the contention that, “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” I wasn’t aware that some Muslims had a creationist bent. Wiki article: Islamic views on evolution - Wikipedia “A 2007 study of religious patterns found that only 8% of Egyptians, 11% of Malaysians, 14% of Pakistanis, 16% of Indonesians, and 22% of Turks agree that Darwin’s theory is probably or most certainly true, and a 2006 survey reported that about 25% of Turkish adults agreed that human beings evolved from earlier animal species.”
That said, there is considerable geographic variation in acceptance of evolution among Islamic countries. While only 35% of the Turkish population believes humans and other living things evolved over time (Pew Survey), the number reaches 78% in Lebanon -way above the US- and 63% in Morocco. Afghanistan and Pakistan clock in at 26% and 30% acceptance. Muslim Views on Religion, Science and Popular Culture | Pew Research Center
Thanks y’all, that’s what I suspected.
The author has been accused of sloppiness by another scholar - that might explain it.
**I resurrect this July 2014 thread. **
Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic reads the same polls that I mentioned in the OP and travels to the Kentucky Creation Museum to get some answers regarding, “The seeming gullibility of my fellow Americans”. Jeffrey Goldberg is a Jewish theist, a leading pundit on Israel, and was one of the cheerleaders for the Iraqi invasion.
I would guess that he hasn’t spent much time at talk.origins: he doesn’t have deep experience with fundis IMHO. That’s ok. Anyway Goldberg asks the proprietor Ken Ham and his associate Terry Mortenson why it’s important to convince visitors that Genesis is a book of history. Ken Ham: "There’s a slippery slope in regard to authority. If you say that the history in Genesis is not true, then you can just take man’s ideas as true. When you go outside of Scripture, why shouldn’t you just reinterpret what marriage means? So our emphasis is on the slippery slope regarding authority.” It seems that biblical inerrancy bleeds into concerns about gay marriage. Huh. I didn’t see that coming. They continue on that vein. Goldberg thinks that creationism might represent more a signal of “…Preference for a more traditional social order, rather than a rejection of modern science…” I don’t take it that way. It seems to me that if you’re concerned about the nuclear family, then divorce should be a more relevant topic of conversation. But that wouldn’t be popular in the pews. So they haul out convenient scapegoats.
Middling article:
Where There Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark?
I partly agree with Ken Ham though. There is a slippery slope with authority: those who believe in one sort of crackpottery are more likely to be easy marks for other nutbag vendors. Not that I see anything wrong with treating the Bible as a source of authority. Goldberg notes that he belongs, “…to a tradition that, in addition to creating the Bible…, came to understand, per Maimonides, that the first chapters of Genesis contain stories meant to advance an understanding of universal, ethical monotheism, rather than scientific explanations for creation.”
I think he’s onto something myself. If you started with no beliefs, looking at the evidence and accepting evolution and an old earth is a no-brainer. So the reason for creationism must be something beyond science or evidence.
If you start with a belief that SSM is evil, for instance, you can justify it in two ways - through ethical reasoning or through authority. But ethical reasoning leads you to accept SSM, so authority is the way to go, and anything that undermines that authority, by doubting the truth of the Bible, is to be resisted as much as possible.
Hamm is clearly afraid that people might be forced to make ethical choices for themselves, and some people are afraid of the same thing. Plenty of religions are okay with this.
BTW, I seem to remember that churches in the south, where the divorce rate is higher than in the more secular north, do try to do something about it through pre-mariage counseling etc. So I’m not sure that they would resist talking about divorce, at least not in general.
What Ham is actually saying though, is that creationism is true because he needs it to be true (the alternative is that other things might start to unravel.) Fallacy of appeal to consequences.