Old Earth Debate: Need Arguments and Resources

[Phobos]

I am guessing that Hank has never read a book on thermodynamics and has never taken a course on that topic. He probably feels that creationist literature is written under the guidance of the Christian God, so that there can be no errors in that literature, and accordingly he has no need to read scientific literature, which is not under the guidance of God and thus can be riddled with error.

Very often true, I'm sure.

One would hope that if the Hanks of this world could be forced to learn thermodynamics, they would publicly renounce at least that portion of anti-evolution literature which is based on false ideas about the Second Law. Does someone like Hank have enough intellectual honesty that he would do that? To me, that is an interesting open question.

Maybe someday AiG will add it to their list of arguments not to use...
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/faq/dont_use.asp
looks like they came close

 

[Janitor]

Phobos, thanks for the link.

One item on the Answers in Genesis page is, "all beneficial processes in the world, including the development from embryo to adult, increase the overall disorder of the universe, showing that the Second Law is not inherently a curse." That is quite enlightened compared to much of Creationist literature. Once a Creationist admits that the Second Law is not violated in the development of an individual organism, it is probably easier for such a person to also be willing to buy the idea that evolution itself doesn't violate the Second Law. (The Creationist may still harbor other reservations about evolution, of course.)

EDIT: spelling mistake

 

[swansont]

It seems to me that one of the strongest attacks a creationist can bring to bear on evolution is that something like two percent of the human population is homosexual. How could millions of years of evolution not have weeded that out?

Attributes can be genetic without being hereditary.

 

[Janitor]

Swansont, if you have time, would you elaborate?

Is childhood leukemia an example? Before modern medical treatment, it may have been uniformly fatal for all I know. If so, then nobody who had it lived long enough to reproduce. Does that mean that if it is not due to some environmental cause, it must be due to a mutated gene?

 

[Oochy]

Okay, going to jump in here.

Disclaimer: I am a Christian


Basicly, I gave up young Earth creation years ago, after seeing vast amounts of evidance against it. I'm now a progressive creationist, which basicly means, instead of calling the brillant minds of the world liars, I look objectivly at what they say, and for the most part agree, unless I have severe evidance for another view. I'm not a theological evolutionist, as I would like to see MUCH more fossils showing transisitions between animals for me to adopt this view point. But, I would like to present another view of creation as natural evolution has to many holes in it, such as the simple lack of evidance for it... but it's late and I'm heading to bed, so I'll be back. ;)

Just wanted to explain who I am before jumping into the battle field. ;)

 

[Andre]

Young Earth - Old Earth OK, Although always interesting I'm not sure if this is the most correct place for a creation - evolution discussion. Although I would be very curious to lean what the creationist point of view is about the continuous unambiguous records of foraminifera evolution in the ODP ocean sediment cores.

 

[Janitor]

May I be staked to an anthill if this is too religious of a post.

Oochy, when Genesis says that there was no pain or suffering on Earth prior to the presence of the first humans, do you dismiss that as poetic license? To me, that is such an important principle of the Biblical description of who God is, that when you put it in the 'fable' category, you have gutted the Bible so badly that it basically has no credibility.

 

[swansont]

Swansont, if you have time, would you elaborate?

Is childhood leukemia an example? Before modern medical treatment, it may have been uniformly fatal for all I know. If so, then nobody who had it lived long enough to reproduce. Does that mean that if it is not due to some environmental cause, it must be due to a mutated gene?

I don't know if childhood leukemia is an example or not - I don't know enough about it. All I was noting was that you can have conditions that are caused by genetics that are not inherited. Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome) is one example - only a small fraction of cases have a heritable factor.

 

[Janitor]

Swansont,

That example helps--thank you. I remember now that Downs is due to the fertilized egg getting extra copies of certain chromosomes. I've heard that the age of the mother is correlated with the liklihood of the child having Downs, but I don't know what the mechanism behind that fact is.

 

[lnx990]

Originally posted by Janitor.
I've heard that the age of the mother is correlated with the liklihood of the child having Downs, but I don't know what the mechanism behind that fact is.

the reason downs syndrome is related to the mothers age is because of the complexities involved with meiosis/oogenesis. When the cells are older they seem to have a harder time dividing the chromosomes evenly, this results in abnormalities. 21 out of 23 times this leads to a miscarrage. 1 out of 23 times it leads to downs syndrome, and the other possibility is either XXX, XXY, or XYY. there's all sorts of names to go with those conditions, but i can't remember any of them.

 

[Janitor]

lnx990, thanks for the additional info. I have heard that XYY men are more likely to be criminal, but I don't know if there was a careful study done on this, or whether it falls into the category of urban legend.

 

[Oochy]

Oochy, when Genesis says that there was no pain or suffering on Earth prior to the presence of the first humans, do you dismiss that as poetic license? To me, that is such an important principle of the Biblical description of who God is, that when you put it in the 'fable' category, you have gutted the Bible so badly that it basically has no credibility.

No, it never says there was no pain or suffering. Like Hugh Ross put it, it's hard to imagine walking through Eden without smashing a few ants. We have assumed much about the Bible, and made it say, what it doesn't. The next creation will be perfect, this one is not, and never was. It was better before "the fall", but not perfect.

 

[Phobos]

Oochy - I'm curious...
How do you reconcile the Garden of Eden story with an old Earth? Billions of years of lost human history? The Garden created long after the Earth was? A varying flow of time?

 

[Janitor]

The next creation will be perfect, this one is not, and never was. It was better before "the fall", but not perfect.- Oochy

I don't mean to seem like I am beating up on you, but it sounds suspiciously like your viewpoint is God was unable to get things just right on the first try, but I'll just bet that with the experience He gained from that try, He will get it right on the second try. That is an interesting theological stance, to say the least.

 

[Oochy]

Oochy - I'm curious...
How do you reconcile the Garden of Eden story with an old Earth? Billions of years of lost human history? The Garden created long after the Earth was? A varying flow of time?

Actually, it's not as hard as it seems. The garden was grown to be ready for when God created the first humans. I'm not sure when that occurred in our model, but I believe we maybe looking at 25,000 years... Don't quote me though.

I don't mean to seem like I am beating up on you, but it sounds suspiciously like your viewpoint is God was unable to get things just right on the first try, but I'll just bet that with the experience He gained from that try, He will get it right on the second try. That is an interesting theological stance, to say the least.

No, that's a simple way of looking at it, but don't feel bad for questioning me. That's how science and research works. No, this is an imperfect world that God created. Why, you ask? For the purpose of creating mortal beings to worship Him, and that choose to worship and love Him, not robots. Unfortuantly, to do that, we must have a free will, and with that, we can choose not to obey Him. Now I'm getting really philisophical here, but bear with me. So to get us to love Him in this life by choice it MUST be an imperfect world, the next world is the reward to us for following Him. Did I make on lick of sense?

 

[Janitor]

In the pre-human era of your Earth, I take it there was imperfection, such as suffering of animals.

So a question is, are humans the only creatures on Earth that God is interested in being worshiped by? Did God get by for millions of years without anything on Earth worshiping and loving him? If there were millions of years, prior to Adam and Eve, of zebras and giraffes and tigers and cockroaches and mice and so on, was all the pain they collectively racked up truly necessary just so that sometime later God could make non-robotic humans to worship him?

For the sake of argument, could we assume for a moment that there was 100 million years of animal life suffering, and for this 100 million years there was nothing on the planet that was actually loving God? And then there was 25,000 more years of suffering of animals and now suffering of humans as well, but at least during this era there was one species on Earth (out of millions of species!) that sometimes managed to worship the right God?

And given what preachers like to say about "the end time is drawing near," can we take it that there won't be more than another 1,000 years of existence for the earth?

In this "model" of Earth, there are then more than 100 million years of suffering without God getting any return on His investment, so to speak, followed by a relatively paltry 26,000 years or less of Him getting non-robotically loved, at least by the "few" that the Bible says manage to find "the narrow path."

 

[BoulderHead]

Originally Posted by Janitor;
My point is that the murdering done by carnivores and parasites is not particularly puzzling if today's biosphere is the result of amoral evolution. But Creationists always believe in the existence of some deity which came before life on Earth, a deity which presumably would continue to be interested in the welfare of living things on Earth and wouldn't just wash His/Her/Its hands of things and walk away at some point after creating life, let alone design a murder instinct into it right from the start.

Originally Posted by russ_watters;
Interesting idea: if God created the animals, why aren't they all herbivores? I'd never considered that.

To both of you; the answer involves knowing the Bible. If you are debating someone who has more than just a cursory knowledge of the Bible you will be on the receiving end of a beating in short time if you use an argument this weak. The reason is that the original creation was vegetarian. This, incidentally is something occultists have understood for a very long time even while many Christians living today still do not.

Genesis 1:29
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

The Hebrew word translated to meat was ‘oklah, which means food, but even without that little morsel it is plain enough in verse 30 to see even the animals were vegetarian.

Meat eating didn’t arrive until Noah’s time;

Genesis 9:3
And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

There are better arguments to use than this.

 

[Janitor]

Does the Bible say when the carnivores got their fangs and the scorpions their stingers, as well as when each of these creatures lost their ruminant stomachs?

 

[BoulderHead]

Hehe, I was going to recommend a different tactic tomorrow. I wanted to run off and post in the 'fun' threads which lively up my spirits.

 

[russ_watters]

Oochy - I'm curious...
How do you reconcile the Garden of Eden story with an old Earth? Billions of years of lost human history? The Garden created long after the Earth was? A varying flow of time?

My personal view is pretty simple: First, if God created the universe, He (She?) also created time. As such, any mention of time in the creation story is meaningless and a human construct to explain something no human at the time had any understanding of. Heck, even if he got a vision directly from God, God wouldn't have been able to impart all of evolution and cosmology on the writer of Genesis. Humans at the time just didn't have the tools necessary to process such information. The story was sufficient for several thousand years, and that was good enough.

For someone who'se beliefs require literal interpretation of the Bible, this idea is obviously a deal-breaker. Tougher to understand (to me) are the vast majority of people who understand that the Bible was written by scientifically illiterate men, yet still try to interpret it literally as much as possible. I don't believe it has to be that way.

 

[russ_watters]

To both of you; the answer involves knowing the Bible. If you are debating someone who has more than just a cursory knowledge of the Bible you will be on the receiving end of a beating in short time if you use an argument this weak. The reason is that the original creation was vegetarian. This, incidentally is something occultists have understood for a very long time even while many Christians living today still do not.

Ok, maybe that's what was meant by those lines (quite frankly, given what I said in my last post, that's pretty thin), but that still has a lot of problems associated with it: when and how did carnivores arise? When and how did humans get the ability to eat meat? Why do we have incisors? One stomach? Was Jesus a vegitarian (likely no, since he ate fish and had fishermen as disciples)?

 

[BoulderHead]

Ok, maybe that's what was meant by those lines (quite frankly, given what I said in my last post, that's pretty thin)…

It may seem pretty thin to you, but it’s important to see that much of what you said in that last post is simply your opinion, not the words in the Bible.

..but that still has a lot of problems associated with it: when and how did carnivores arise? When and how did humans get the ability to eat meat? Why do we have incisors? One stomach?

Of course it leaves other problems (I never said it didn’t). My point is clearly laid out in my original post. That argument I warned against will put the speaker on the defensive and possibly make him/her appear foolish. From that position an attempt to regain lost ground is made by countering with the very same questions you ask above.

Was Jesus a vegitarian (likely no, since he ate fish and had fishermen as disciples)?

A likely counter to this; Jesus came after the time of Noah.

 

[Janitor]

I was jawing back and forth with Oochy in this thread, on the subject of animal suffering and the history of life on earth. Today I looked at a USA Today newspaper, and there was an article which made mention of 70+ million year old ammonite fossils found in Canada. One was said to have marks from a dinosaur biting it. Now that had to be painful, if the teeth managed to puncture the shell.

 

[loseyourname]

My personal view is pretty simple: First, if God created the universe, He (She?) also created time. As such, any mention of time in the creation story is meaningless and a human construct to explain something no human at the time had any understanding of. Heck, even if he got a vision directly from God, God wouldn't have been able to impart all of evolution and cosmology on the writer of Genesis. Humans at the time just didn't have the tools necessary to process such information. The story was sufficient for several thousand years, and that was good enough.

For someone who'se beliefs require literal interpretation of the Bible, this idea is obviously a deal-breaker. Tougher to understand (to me) are the vast majority of people who understand that the Bible was written by scientifically illiterate men, yet still try to interpret it literally as much as possible. I don't believe it has to be that way.

Has Russ been reading Kenneth Miller?

 

[Loren Booda]

Has anyone here offered the site www.reasons.org? Hugh Ross's method there is to bend scientific observation and theory, including the Big Bang, to suit fundamentalist religious beliefs.

 

[loseyourname]

Someone posted a link to that site from one of these forums. I can't remember which one. Kenneth Miller suggests that quantum indeterminacy is necessary for free will as well as for the freedom of natural events (for example, to keep evolution from being pre-determined). He also tried to argue for the existence of God using fundamental mass and force constants that he says are perfectly calibrated so as to create a universe that would eventually result in the arising of intelligent life.

It's all in Finding Darwin's God. It's still a lot of logical fallacy and wishful thinking, but it's a lot better than all the creationist literature and at least he understands science - well, biology anyway.

 

[Phobos]

His discussions on evolution seem excellent. And in his frequent public debates with Creationists, he doesn't discuss his evidences for God (at least, as far as I have seen from what is available in his book & on the internet).

I'd say that Kenneth Miller is a good scientist...as opposed to Hugh Ross who has a decent understanding of scientific ideas but then inserts many leaps of faith. (Which is fine for a personal philosophy, but not for scientific theories.)

 

[Janitor]

There was a brief item in the paper a day or two ago about a stone tool and a piece of homonid (terminology?) skull that have been found. I can't remember for sure the age that they are believed to be, but it may have been 900,000 years. Does anybody know more about this?

 

[loseyourname]

I'd say that Kenneth Miller is a good scientist...as opposed to Hugh Ross who has a decent understanding of scientific ideas but then inserts many leaps of faith. (Which is fine for a personal philosophy, but not for scientific theories.)

Miller is an excellent scientist. He keeps his religious beliefs where they belong. Ross and Behe and Eden and guys like that are a completely different story.

 

[Loren Booda]

Does the Gaia hypothesis fit between the old and new Earth theories?

 

[Janitor]

I tuned into Christian radio for a few minutes this morning. The program was Hank Hanegraaff, "The Bible Answer Man," who is president of the Christian Research Institute (CRI)... The Moon is just the right mass to form some tides on Earth, but not to make really huge tides. Only a caring God could have arranged this...

... Why a creationist should be so concerned with tides, I don't know, and Hank did not say why. Isn't it evolutionists who suggest tidal pools as a good environment for getting life started? ...

Well, I stumbled upon this website

http://www.sivanandadlshq.org/messages/sciblgod.htm

which contains this:

... If our moon were, say, only 50,000 miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides might be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains could soon be eroded away...

So that must have been what Hanegraaff was referring to.

My response would be to point out that there likely are places in the universe where tides do in fact create enough havoc for a few hundred million years to prevent terrestrial life from making an appearance. Would Mr. Hanegraaff blame his deity for making some places in the universe unnecessarily harsh, I wonder?

 

[Andre]

Well, since the moon is receding about something like an inch a year, the distance between Earth and moon may have been reduced quite a bit 20-30% ROM in the past, I would say according to my old envellope. Tides may have been double the size of now.

But we need the moon to keep the Earth stable. If Venus had had a moon like Earth it may also have had life.

Reading that paper I realize that there are two worlds. A created Earth and a "evolved" Earth. I don't think it is doable to merge them together into one world. We just have to live with that.

 

[Kakarot]

Well I like debating this subject and I came up with an argument in support for an old universe/earth. If the universe/earth is a mere 6000 years old then how is it possible for us to see galaxies millions of light years away with telescopes? We couldn't, they would be invisible to us because their light would take longer than the age of the universe to reach us! A creationist might argue that god willed it to be this way, or that this is a deception from satan.

 

[Andre]

Actually there are two worlds, one of 4,6 billion years old and another one of 6000 years. The first world is sure of this because they have a dozen independent techniques to calculate that age. The 6000 years old world is sure of it too, because somebody who can know it, says so.

Somehow those two worlds got merged, I don't know, a peculiar worm hole or so. Now we are ended up with intermingled people of two worlds whose main objective seems to be to convince the others of their truth.

This is tragical, since none of those parties will ever succeed because there are two worlds.

 

[Kakarot]