Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

User avatar
TK
Posts: 1477
Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:42 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by TK » Fri Nov 07, 2014 4:09 pm

Steve wrote:
What some people call the "appearance of age" (especially when coupled with the complaint that this would make God deceptive) presupposes that God wanted people to reach their conclusions in the absence of what He has revealed on the subject. God leaves man no reason to be deceived about how long it took for the first rocks, plants or arriving light from the stars to come to be. That is all written down in the revelation He gave on the subject—right down to days, and (in the genealogies) the years when this occurred. If someone wishes to reject God's revelation and to trust some other source (whether anti-supernaturalistic scientific theories, intuitions or superstitions)—and thereby reaches wrong conclusions—how in the world can God, who told the truth from the beginning, be charged as a deceiver?
Good point; I have never looked at it this way.

TK

User avatar
Jason
Posts: 379
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 12:28 pm

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by Jason » Fri Nov 07, 2014 5:57 pm

Matt, thanks for offering your thoughts on the issue. I always find your posts to be fair-minded and worthy of consideration. My hesitation in accepting YEC is a personal and sometimes irrational skepticism of everything, though oddly I'm open to whatever sounds most plausible. Perhaps our brains work alike. Here are my remaining concerns:

1) What do we make of vestigial organs/appendages in commonly linked species that seem to indicate biological evolution occurred?

and

2) Francis Collins insists that there's a sequence misfiring in the human genome that exactly matches the same misfire in the genome of apes. As someone not schooled in genetics, this sounds like an impressive link. What are your thoughts?

User avatar
Homer
Posts: 2995
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 11:08 pm

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by Homer » Fri Nov 07, 2014 8:26 pm

....how would you explain The Light from distance galaxies many light years away being seen in an INSTANT on the day of creation? Again, this can be measured. If a scientist on "The Day" the stars were created could have measured this, he/she would ascertain them to be millions of light years away, they would have been baffled, not able to answer the impossible. Because time and age would have coincided with His creative work.
Why is it strange to think that God made a star and the "stream" of light to the earth at the same time? Are we to think, for example, that He made the Mississippi River by dumping water in at the headwaters or did He create the stream from the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico in an instant? Why should we think the former rather than the latter?

User avatar
TheEditor
Posts: 814
Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2010 9:09 pm

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by TheEditor » Fri Nov 07, 2014 10:46 pm

Hi Steve,
If someone wishes to reject God's revelation and to trust some other source


Here is were I would take issue. We are supposing that this is either an acceptance of God's revelation, or a rejection of it. Personally, I feel more comfortable allowing for the language of Scripture (as all languages are) to be a bit more elastic in how they convey thought, than I am about rocks, fossils, etc. In other words, "words" are a bit more pliable than rocks. :)

By the way Steve, it was nice to meet you the other night. Hopefully my presence was not a grievance to the holy spirit. :lol:

Regards, Brenden.
[color=#0000FF][b]"It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery."[/b][/color]

User avatar
robbyyoung
Posts: 811
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 2:23 am

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by robbyyoung » Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:09 am

Homer wrote:
....how would you explain The Light from distance galaxies many light years away being seen in an INSTANT on the day of creation? Again, this can be measured. If a scientist on "The Day" the stars were created could have measured this, he/she would ascertain them to be millions of light years away, they would have been baffled, not able to answer the impossible. Because time and age would have coincided with His creative work.
Why is it strange to think that God made a star and the "stream" of light to the earth at the same time? Are we to think, for example, that He made the Mississippi River by dumping water in at the headwaters or did He create the stream from the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico in an instant? Why should we think the former rather than the latter?
Homer, I think you Steve are not understanding me, what a surprise :lol:. My argument IS FOR the supernatural in creation, not against it? I'm a YEC myself who simply believes that age and time (appearance, if you will) was built in. Now I've given two NT account concerning The Fish and The Bread. No ones seems to want to address this. That bread had the elapse of time present with it. It wasn't raw dough, it was baked and more than likely had the scars of browning in its natural process, and that's evidence of AGE and TIME. If God can do this with bread and leave this evidence, why are we so adamantly against this in Genesis? I'm not buying the deception argument. Was God being deceitful in The Bread and Fish? Of course not! I think this deceit argument is nothing more than human insecurity.

God Bless.

steve7150
Posts: 2597
Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:44 am

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by steve7150 » Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:33 am

Now I've given two NT account concerning The Fish and The Bread. No ones seems to want to address this. That bread had the elapse of time present with it. It wasn't raw dough, it was baked and more than likely had the scars of browning in its natural process, and that's evidence of AGE and TIME. If God can do this with bread and leave this evidence, why are we so adamantly against this in Genesis?








Robby,
I think Homer had just agreed with you by the example he gave. Your examples are good examples and possibly could be prototypes of all of God's creation. The only differences between YECs and Old Earthers are at what point God stopped supernaturally creating stuff and at what point He let his natural laws take effect.

User avatar
robbyyoung
Posts: 811
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 2:23 am

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by robbyyoung » Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:42 am

steve7150 wrote: Now I've given two NT account concerning The Fish and The Bread. No ones seems to want to address this. That bread had the elapse of time present with it. It wasn't raw dough, it was baked and more than likely had the scars of browning in its natural process, and that's evidence of AGE and TIME. If God can do this with bread and leave this evidence, why are we so adamantly against this in Genesis?

Robby,
I think Homer had just agreed with you by the example he gave. Your examples are good examples and possibly could be prototypes of all of God's creation. The only differences between YECs and Old Earthers are at what point God stopped supernaturally creating stuff and at what point He let his natural laws take effect.
Hi steve7150,

Oh, well since he only quoted me and not Steve's reply to my example, I figured he was in disagreement with me. I apologize if i was mistaken.

Yes, thanks for the vote of confidence. I believe after the 7th day of rest, the supernatural ended, but probably not altogether, I just don't know.

God Bless.

User avatar
backwoodsman
Posts: 536
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2009 11:32 am
Location: Not quite at the ends of the earth, but you can see it from here.

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by backwoodsman » Sat Nov 08, 2014 2:59 pm

mattrose wrote:I think it fits best with God's love (the most important theological truth), since other views necessitate millions and millions of years of death and decay. I think it fits best with our doctrine of sin coming through one man, since other views see lots of sin and violence in the world prior to the first humans.
Words like death, decay, and violence have no theological significance apart from moral creatures with free will. They're simply part of how the world works. There can be no life without death, apart from the Tree of Life, of course, from which only Adam & Eve ate; there was no Tree of Life for animals. Decay is simply other creatures living their lives as God designed them. And violence -- Jesus said God feeds the birds; did He mean only the herbivorous ones? Doesn't He feed the carnivores too?
I think it fits best with eschatology, since the Bible seems to speak of Noah's flood as a world wide judgment to be repeated in the future.
As far as judgment is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the flood covered the entire planet, or killed all non-human life. What matters is, it killed all the people except those on the ark. The Bible text doesn't require that it covered the whole planet, only the part where man was present.
I think it fits best with theological anthropology, since the Bible says humans alone were created in the image of God (did God just zap the first people with it after a long line of creatures almost genetically indistinguishable from their successors?).
This is an argument against theistic evolution, but not against old-earth creationism. OEC says God specifically created each species, including the pre-human hominids, to fill specific niches at specific times. The fact that He re-used certain design features doesn't imply evolution; it implies that He's a good designer who does things efficiently, just like good human designers do.
This argument is all built on the rhetorical assumption that the earth looks very old. As I stated above, I think you're already into the realm of interpretation when state that as a fact.
It's far from rhetorical assumption, and is based on far more than the superficial "way things look." The physical universe is not simply a monolithic pile of stuff; it's an extremely complex web of intricate parts that all have to work together, none of which can be changed without setting off cascading changes through everything else. There's a lot we don't know, but there's much more than you or I will ever understand, that is known and very well understood. For example, when YECs say the speed of light may have changed, they're pulling it out of the air to make a belief system work with certain commonly known scientific facts. But when physicists say the speed of light can't possibly have ever changed without rendering life and maybe even the entire physical universe impossible, they're basing it on well-understood hard science -- way above your or my pay grade, but hard science nonetheless.
I am suggesting that one of the devil's strategies has been to create a worldview of naturalism that pulls all people in its direction. This plays itself out in such a way that Christians feel more and more ashamed of supernatural claims and are more and more led to believe in more naturalistic belief systems.
No doubt this is indeed part of the devil's strategy. That being the case, the prominent YEC activists play right into his hand by forcing it to be a divisive issue and causing many Christians to believe they have to be either YEC or not a Christian. From there, cognitive dissonance forces many to see no choice but to abandon at least part of their faith. Such a pointless tragedy, all the more tragic because it could be so easily avoided by the application of a little grace in place of the divisiveness.
I could see some theological advantage to the old earth perspective (it certainly would seem to illustrate God's patience well). I just have a hard time fathoming how an all-wise God would pick a plan that involved millions and millions of years just to get to the point where some creature could seriously be called an image bearer of the Almighty. Certainly God would not have been dependent on doing it in this way, right?
God can do things however He likes, of course. But why would the time element matter to God? To OEC, it seems obvious that an all-wise, eternal God will do things in whatever way He sees best, with no reference to any time element. Not to mention, a 13.8-billion-year-long process, every tiny detail intricately preplanned and executed at exactly the right moment, just so we humans would have a suitable place to live for an infinitesimally short blink of an eye of a few thousand years -- that says a hundred times more about not only His patience, but also His love, majesty, glory, and many other attributes, than can ever be squeezed from a 144-hour *poof*. At least, that's certainly my impression after being YEC most of my life, and then looking into and coming to understand what OEC really says (as opposed to the common YEC mischaracterizations of it).
Are you asking how I come to the conclusion that Jesus was a young earth creationist? I think that his statements most readily lead me to believe that Genesis 1-11 were genuine history, not myth.
Again, an argument against theistic evolution, but not against old-earth creationism. OEC also believes Genesis is genuine, literal history.

User avatar
willowtree
Posts: 100
Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2014 1:56 pm
Location: Sooke BC Canada

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by willowtree » Sat Nov 08, 2014 3:06 pm

My previous post may have left the impression that I was not a YEC. I am definitely more YEC than OEC, though I do not feel bound to a creation that was over and done in 144 hours. I see in the way the term 'day' is applied to the first creation period, that the term is applied as a metaphor based on the elements of darkness and light, without any reference to the duration of the time of each of them. The very application of the metaphor indicates to me that perhaps the time element was definitely not twelve hours of darkness followed by twelve hours of light.

I may be a (very) young teenager on the YEC - OEC scale.

The most important verse in the Bible to me regarding creation, is found in Hebrews 11:3. When I affirmed that in my thinking, it changed the way I was able to look at creation. For one thing, the way it happened was not as important as who did it. This freed me from feeling threatened by all the 'scientific' evidence that was presented as 'unassailable'.

For another, the resources applied to creation were not limited to the 'natural' but could well (actually did) include the supernatural. The creation began with something invisible that became visible, so its beginning started earlier than evolution explains. The presuppositions I can bring to the creation event, then, allow me to accept a creation period that was, relatively speaking, quite short.

On the other hand, those who do not factor these elements into their thinking, must of necessity, provide or allow sufficient time for the changes to occur according to 'natural' processes and time frames. Also, in their suppositions must be some thinking that there could be no catastrophic events that hurried the process along. This might mean that even more time may be required. And time was a limitless quantity. It could be stretched back as far as needed to get the job done. I am not a scientist, and am making some assumptions here. But as a believer, I do not believe God needed to have a protracted period of time to complete the creation, even if the 'days' were perhaps longer than twenty four hours.

I may also be somewhat naïve as well, since I believe that no matter what our arguments are, if our presuppositions are faulty, then our conclusions will also be faulty.

Regards,

Graeme
If you find yourself between a rock and a hard place, always head for the rock. Ps 62..

steve7150
Posts: 2597
Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:44 am

Re: Why I'm still a Young Earth Creationist

Post by steve7150 » Sat Nov 08, 2014 4:35 pm

Really what does a 24hr day mean to God? The YEC belief is that the sun was created on the 4th day (i think) and man wasn't around until the 6th day so for the first three or four days there may have been no sun and no man therefore what significance would 24 hours mean? Plus the 7th day is still open and continuing so right here the 7th day is not 24 hours.

Post Reply

Return to “Creation/Evolution”