When I attended church (I do not presently, nor have for a long time) the issue of the age of the earth or creation/evolution never came up. I'm guessing the simple reason is that most clergymen realize it's too deep a subject that would they consider not worthy of any divide it might cause in their congregations.
To answer your question simply, people get the idea of the age of the Earth by counting the line from Adam to Christ in the bible, adding all the ages.
As for Earth(or Universe) being created or macro evolving, that is a matter of a person's faith. From my perspective, someone relying on tree rings, ice cores, radiometric dating and so forth for a reliable guestimate on the Earth's age is failing to apply that logic of observation based conclusion when they also make declarations of ultimate origins that have to do with miraculous chance order out of chaos. Theist and Atheist alike believe it came from nothing - it is more a matter of faith in an intelligent force for the former, or blind random chance for the latter. Although my religious leanings have changed over the years, I've always been in the intelligent design camp.
Logic . . .
. . . will not tell you what is true.
Logic will only tell you what else is true.
Golly, that sure sounds profound.
Can you explain what it means?
Measure this number against seating for a professional sports stadium.
Depending on how old you thin Young Earth is…6 to 11 thousand years…doing the math, only about 15-25 souls per year are eligible for eternal salvation!
Heaven must be…small.
Yes … sure … science is a threat to religion. However, is religion a threat to science? The Bible says 6,000 year old Earth and the Earth is the center of the Solar System, how does this change Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion?
It doesn’t …
If this is about politics, then remember, all politicians lie for votes.
The Bible does not. The 6000 years figure is based on the ham-fisted analysis of a guy done 1600 years after the New Testament events. And geocentrism is only there is you have an incredibly literal interpretation (basically it mentions the sun moving in the sky, which is does if we’re being relative), and it is a mistake to say that Galileo was science vs. religion. Many secular-ish scientists were opposed to heliocentrism, and many religious figures supported Galileo.
Let’s not get too smug or insulting about Bishop Ussher. Numerous people, prior to the nineteenth century, have tried to work out the date of Creation and most of them have come close to similar dates. In the period before Lyell provided new geological observations and inferences regarding a much older earth, speculation regarding the date of Creation was an understandable enterprise. Ignoring the theology from this Answers in Genesis page, they list 32 different calculations ranging from 5501 B.C.E. to 3836 B.C.E. including three that come very close to Ussher’s 4004. The Jewish calendar is currently year 5774, which only differs from Ussher by 245 years.
That Ussher’s was picked as the “correct” date by American Evangelicals is hardly his fault. And there was nothing “ham-fisted” about his calculations.
It has to be. Like co-ops on the Upper East Side, exclusivity is part of the attraction. Did you really go through a lifetime of virtue to get to heaven only to find that your loud and obnoxious uncle Ferd is your new neighbor? Hardly. Your neighbors were all carefully pre-screened. Many aspire, few are selected. Plus, all the residents are like *major *conspicuous consumers. Their lifestyles are replete with God’s plenteous bounty – that’s why they call it heaven, after all – but the carbon footprint and energy bills are hell. This is not a scalable ecosystem.
The extrapolation method relies on too many variables and assumes that the Bible references every minutiae. But I guess you’re right and it was similar to Galileo - by the methods of the time it was perfectly cromulent to figure out dates that way, or quite logical to oppose unorthodox theories.
I don’t mind insulting him though. Guy was a douche, if hardly the worst among his contemporaries
But he was a Primate, just like monkeys and cave men. Must count for something.
Is that so surprising? Atheism is simply no belief in a god, not a belief in evolution. There are explanations for how we got here that require neither gods nor natural processes.
I find that an interesting proposition, and I would request that you expound on it further.
I’ve heard it argued that the Big Bang was not a “natural process” because it didn’t rely on any of the “laws of nature” which operate in our universe.
e.g., you can’t say that the Big Bang violates the laws of thermodynamics (although Creationists certainly try!)
The trick here is that there might be three kinds of processes under discussion, not merely two. In addition to “natural” and “supernatural,” there might also be “extranatural,” such as the as-yet-unknown laws of physics which might exist in a parallel universe.
But all this really does is ask us to take a step back and consider the entire suite of parallel universes as our new “natural” cosmos.
None I ever heard of. Please explain.
There was a sect/cult a few years back called the Raelians who claimed that we were dropped off by space aliens. They made claims that they cloned someone a few years back - no cloned people turned up and they seemed to vanish from the media’s attention.
Wiki page. I think they qualify. Not impossible, just wrong.
Or the Scientologists with their spaceships having dropped ancient souls into volcanos or something like that…
Maybe that was what Scytheria was getting at…but I’d still like to hear it from him/her.
But that just pushes the question back a stage – where did the aliens come from, if neither from gods nor natural processes? Or is it clones, clones, clones all the way down?
No more than “God” pushes the question back a stage. Where did He come from?
We hear that a lot, but I regard that as a logical fallacy. We are faced with empirical evidence that the universe appears to have had a beginning. The paradox of the universe is that it obeys natural laws that define our reality, but those laws cannot explain its origin. The demand for an explanation for an origin simply comes from the observation that there was one, and that there was therefore some kind of transition from an extra-natural reality (like the singularity or an unobservable spacetime geometry) to the observable reality.
Whereas God is posited as already within such an extra-natural reality, where the laws of physics or causality have no more relevance than traffic laws. One can believe or disbelieve in God, that’s not the point. The point is that if one takes a theistic position, it’s silly to demand a scientific account of causality for it.
Of course that’s no excuse for believing complete bullshit about matters of biology or astronomy about which science can and does provide definitive answers.
Certainly, although I think I should refine my original statement: There are explanations for how we got here that require neither gods nor natural processes.
There’s an error of omission, in that I should have said ‘entirely natural processes’. Forgive me for that.
Anyway, the two ‘main’ positions in all this are DIVINE CREATOR and BLIND HAZARD. The first posits that human beings (and, indeed, all life and the universe it lives in) were manufactured by an intelligent being with powers and purpose beyond our mortal, limited understanding. The second posits that a slow, random process of gradual change (usually resulting from environmental changes) accounts for everything.
I suggest, however, that there are further options to consider:
[ul]
[li]INTELLIGENT DESIGN - does not require a god or paranormal world, only someone or something smart enough to do the job. The 'aliens did it’ or ‘we time-travelled from the future and seeded the universe with the things that evolved into it, creating a weird closed loop’ fall into this category.[/li][li]DIVINE HAZARD - requires a creator who, as his/her/its magnum opus, created evolution and then left it running to see what happens. You can add the time loop to this too - evolution evolves the creator being, who travels back through time and creates evolution.[/li][li]UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN - Lamarkism falls into this category. Proto-giraffe can’t reach the treetops. Proto-giraffe stretches a lot. Baby proto-giraffes inherit a more elastic neck.[/li][li]DEVOLUTION - Evolution seems (from the fossil record) to come in sudden bursts. This is more easily explained if the process works backwards - we are not evolving at all, instead we are devolving from higher beings, losing bits when we do so. It only looks like evolving because we perceive time the wrong way round.[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there are others, but these give the general idea. No, I don’t subscribe to any of them, but neither do I subscribe to the original offerings.
Scy