Evolution and the Bible. Confirm or contradict?
 

I posted this in "deep waters" but it has gotten no responses, so I am not sure if it was just in the wrong place, or everyone though it was boring and no one responded LOL.


So often you hear the debate from both sides of the issue.

"The Bible says this about creation, or that about the flood, or it claims this about the earth and heaven etc etc."

"Science has proven such and such about mankind's origins, and science tells us something else about the earth and the seas, etc etc."

Inevitably, both sides always seem to clash. Neither side willing to give an open mind to the other, for being to busy to prove each other wrong.

The interesting thing is, the Bible tells us what happened, and who did it, but it doesnt really tell us how it was done.

However, science is very eager to discover, and explain how it all came about, the problem is, science denies the "who" and "what" part of the issue.

Now, I believe, that God is the "who", and the source of the "what", and science merely explains the "how".

For example.....

God created the heavens and the earth, and all therein.
At first look, the theory of evolution seems to contradict the Bible's claim.
But lets look deeper.

Genesis 1:20
20 And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Now, isn't that what science claims as well? Life started in the seas, and evolved into all the living creatures that walk slither and fly?
Here it seems that science actually proves the Bible correct!

Now, like I said before, science refuses to admit the existence of God, so they cannot figure out the "missing link" in the whole evolution of man bit.

But again, the Bible explains it well. God is the missing link!
He created cattle, and their kind so it is reasonable to believe he created apes and their kind. Some of which have gone extinct like many other species. Its also reasonable to believe that some of the ape like creatures were more like, and other less like, man. Would it be hard to assume that the ones more similar to man, would have been perceived to be threats from both apes, AND man, and therefore hunted to extinction? Science has found evidence of beings that fit that description.
Now they happen to think it was less evolved man, because they are not open to the thought of creation. But yet they cannot explain that missing link.

Again, GOD is the missing link, as he created those monkeys apes and their kind, but he also created man, in his own image.

There are MANY other points I could make about how it seems the Bible and science in fact confirm each other.
But that's what this thread is about. What do all of you think?

Now I certainly do not claim to know all the answers, far from it, and my theory may be proven wrong, who knows. But I believe it worthy of discussion: and what better place than among apostolic believers, People who know the word, and desire to search it with an open heart and mind?

Good post!
www.reasons.org for more information. :)
(Listening to their weekly podcast now!)

Genesis says that plants were created before the sun, moon, and stars.

Where?

Genesis 1:12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

13And the evening and the morning were the third day.

14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Ahhh! cool deal! Now I have to look into what science says about that.

Ah...but there's another possible way of reading it. The term "God made" in verse 16 could mean, "God made to appear". The sun, moon, and stars could have been created in verse one, and only made visible from an earthly perspective on the fourth day.

I believe in flexibility regarding creation theology. I know a very devout Pentecostal who believes in Theistic Evolution. He believes the Genesis narrative is a sort of divine story, not a literal fact. He believes that the creation, Adam and Eve, the serpent, and the tree are more symbolic than literal, expressing eternal divine truths.

Another interpretation I have often studied is known as Day Age Creationism. It would sum the Creation up as follows:

http://www.pcontrols.ch/religion/eng...r7.htm#Summary

Start with the nebular theory of planetary formation. *** Updating: ChristopherHall has brought this out already.

It could well be that from an entirely earth-centric perspective that the bodies known as the sun, the moon, and etc. became individually discernable at a later time due to the haziness of Earth's atmosphere and the still present nebula gasses and billions of years ago.

I don't know that I'm completely satisfied with that, but it's a start.

Another way of looking at it, however is from a rabbinic perspective where the various items that were considered "of a kind" were identified with a special note in Genesis. This would say that the items as they are listed in the creation accounts are not intended to be listed in the order they were created, but are listed in catagories conforming to Jewish Law.

Don't forget that there are competing theories to the Big Bang or to at least how it occured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology

And that would explain how "evening and morning" were the first, second, and third days before the sun was even created. Always wondered about that one. But it does say "made" and not "revealed" or something like that. I wonder if the wording in the original language allows for that interpretation.

Not far from what I believe. It seems much more likely than a literal Adam, formed from dust, and a literal Eve, formed from Adam's rib, who literally spoke with a serpent and literally ate the fruit, etc. etc.

But some hard-core literal creationists stick to their guns. Even so far as to say that if Genesis is not literally true, then you can't trust anything else in the Bible.

One problem I see with Day Age is that Genesis seems pretty careful to present the days as the normal 24-hour variety: and evening and morning were the Nth day. Otherwise, though, it's fairly plausible, in the big picture.

Oh, but what epoch corresponded to the seventh "day", when God rested? Is that now? Is He still resting? :dunno

Despite what is taught in schools, there is not ONE shred of evidence for evolution and yet the evolutionists say we have faith!! I find it interesting at what is deemed as "chaos" is only that to them who do not believe in Gen.

Actually there IS evidence for Evolution. There are two kinds of Evolution. Macro and Micro. One is without a doubt proven. The other has "evidence", however it's the conclusion of what the evidence means that is what we disagree on

And I might add some of the evidence is weak, but evidence none-the-less...

But the bigger issue is not so much what evidences do they have, but what crucial evidences are totally missing :-)

I believe in the literal Adam and Eve myself as the bible goes to great lengths to describe them as two real people. They also probably walked the Earth somewhere between 12 and 30 thousand years ago -some evidence seems to suggest 30-50 thousand years.
However, I am firmly in the day age camp and watch in sort of sad amusement as the young earth crowd has to do contortion after contortion to fit the geologic and astronomic evidence into a 6 thousand year old Universe.

There is a tremendous amount of evidence supporting both micro and macro evolution. So much so, that fundamentalists have been forced in recent years to accept micro evolution as fact.

Where a believing scientist would disagree with a nonbelieving scientist is on the question of "What does it mean." Some scientists like Richard Dawkins emphasize what appears to them to be "meaninglessness" in nature. Others, such as Christian De Duve see nature as providing evidence of "meaningfulness."

Despite the recent opening of a multi-million dollar museum in N. Kentucky devoted to their teachings, "Creation Science" and its proponents are on the skids. They have failed to provide any kind of a theoretical model that explains what we observe in nature. We'll talk about their complete lack of EVIDENCE later; they don't even have a theory.

The Unification Church (the "Moonies") has attempted to fill this deficiency by giving millions in funding to Philip Johnson's Discovery Institute. Johnson, for obvious reasons won't talk about his funding with any more candor than Kent Hovind talks about his taxes. The Discovery Institute has spent the past decade and a half rehashing Michael Behe's discredited "Irreducible Complexity" argument. Other than the fact that Dr. Behe actually supports biological evolution, nothing new has come from DI in years.

The Church has almost always chosen to fight the wrong battles. From the castrated eunuchs of the once completely Christianized Eastern Med. region (now almost completely Muslim), to the Doctrine of the Trinity, to geology and the age of the earth to biological evolution: the true miracle is that we're not all having this discussion in Arabic right now.

I would beg to differ that "Irreducible Complexity" has been discredited. Some of Michael Behe's examples, such as a mousetrap, have been poked full of holes, but on the cellular level, it is indeed a huge issue. The most BASIC components of a cell, such as a few protein molecules (shoot, a SINGLE protein molecule) and more problematic, the cell membrane, are simple not something that can arise under any random circumstances.
The simplest possible life form is still to be determined but as of now it consists of a couple hundred DNA sequences, a cocktail of protein and amino acids wrapped up by a cell membrane. And even this can only survive in absolutely optimum laboratory conditions.

Anyone heard the theory that light used to travel much, much faster than it does now? Yeah, ya see, that's why we can see galaxies today that are millions of light years away, and yet were created only 6,000 years ago, ya see.

Yeah, that's right R.W. - beg! Disagree with me, will you? http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/c.../spacer100.gif sorry!

It's actually on the cellular level that most of the criticism is focused. There are some "real world" examples like the following which I proposed - only to see someone else publish it first in the FAQ. But I have to confess their explanation was more pithy than mine.

I tried to explain one major problem with Irreducible Complexity to a stone mason friend, this way:

We were standing beneath a stone archway like the image I've stolen below:

http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/c.../stonearch.jpg

You're probably familiar with how the arch works, but let me bore you with an explanation. Notice the heavy stones that form the arch itself. Now, imagine you're the mason and you want to build this arch. To get the thing laid up you need to first lay stone "A" and then let "A" sit in place until the mortar has hardened to allow it to bear weight. Next you must lay up stone "B."

But for stones "B" and onward you've got a real problem. Now you must hold stone "B" in place and hope that gravity doesn't take over and send "B" to the ground. "C" and onward actually require you to defy gravity. My point to my stone mason friend was that the stone arch had to have been built in ZERO GRAVITY. He laughed, and pointed out the obvious:

http://www.technologystudent.com/images2/keystn2.gif

You use a wooden or other scaffolding to support the structure until the mortar is set and the keystone is in place. Then when the arch is secure you remove the scaffold and move on. "But," I protested, "there's no evidence that there was a scaffold here."

"That's because they did a good job and cleaned up after themselves. There's no purpose for the scaffold after the arch is in place and so it is removed," he explained. Then he asked me what my point was:

The Mullerian Two-Step: Add a part, make it necessary or, Why Behe's "Irreducible Complexity" is silly

Irreducible Complexity Demystified

Note: If you're not familiar with talkorigins it can be rather rough and tumble for the Christian at times. One of the primary contributers to the archive, however, is a believer who teaches and works at a nearby school of higher learning. As always, read with discernment, don't get your hackles up too easily and keep a good sense of humor.

There are many chemical "structures" in the living cell that from their present appearance, would seem to be "irreducibly complex." However, when a biochemist looks for these same "structures" in other organisms they will sometimes find the little "scaffolds" still in place or other clues as to how the complex molecule came to be. Behe claimed that there had been no research done on this subject. Unforunately there was literally an avalanche of examples cited by the scientific community- some of them miffed by what they thought was neglect to their own voluminous writings.

I have been thinking of the "anti-Behe" argument as actually being an argument in favor of "meaningfulness" and "direction" in biological evolution. Someday I hope to get enough time to see if there's a solid Theistic argument in all of that.

You know...if it was a Christian using his argument about the scaffolding being there then being removed so you can't see the evidence of it, they'd accuse God of trying to deceive everyone. By that I mean a Christian argument for the argument that the earth has been around for so long...some say that God just made it that way.

so that chemically it looks the age it should be but in duration God sped up the process.

But we "see" light traveling across interstellar and even intergalactic distances moving at the present speed of light.

In the case of my avatar, this is a period of several months - 20,000 years ago. For me to make this animated gif I would have to have been "Adam" himself if the "light speed deterioration" theory was true. ******* "The Man" won't let me load my old animated avatar back up. But here's a thumbnail:

http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/c...imated_gif.gif


Consider: When Voyager 1 was first launched in 1977 it reached the distance of the moon after a couple of days. Its regular radio transmissions took a predictable 1.3 seconds to reach Earth. When Voyager 1 reached Jupiter, it took a little around 35 - 40 minutes for the signal to travel to Earth (depending on where Earth was in its orbit around the sun- 43 minutes to reach the sun itself). Currently its taking about 14.36 hours for a transmission to be received. The space throughout our solar system is predictable in nature and light travels prdictably throughout the solar system.

The eclipses of Jupiter's moons were observed by Galileo and he recorded a strange "variance" in their timing. That "variance" was of course due to the 35 - 40 minute travel time for the light to get from Jupiter to Earth. Today, math wizards with too much time on their hands can go through Galileo's 400 year old observations find the speed of light hasn't changed at all. Looking at my avatar gives proof that the speed of light hasn't changed in the last 20,000 years.

This pic shows that it hasn't changed in the last 167,000 years: A star with a "halo" around it explodes and becomes visible on earth for the first time. Over a period of years the shock waves continue out toward the "halo" of gasses and there they cause rapid compression and the subsequent fire show that we see later.

This is from the Large Magellanic Cloud- a "companion" galaxy to the Milkyway and about 167,000 light years away. The first pic is from 1987 and I believe they go up through 2002. Light travels at the anticipated speeds through "intergalactic space" and we observe no anomolous behavior over the space of 167,000 years.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may.../snedit_lg.jpg


In the following example- we observe a star going "supernova" close to 10 Billion years ago. And "10 Billion" is a conservative estimate of the distance. We are observing ongoing physical processes across vast distances of space. The smaller objects are known to be galaxies that are more than 12 Billion years ago (and away).

http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/c.../1995-2002.jpg

******* Add another note here: The YECs (Young Earth Creationists) will often bring up some recent experiments of "faster than light speed" and "slower than light speed" experiments. In all of these experiments, the change in light speed was only accomplished over very short distances- and I mean very short- micromillimeters. And the effects could only be achevied by passing the laser amplified light through some sort of medium like cessium. Einstein's "constant" (the 'c' in EMC) is qualified to be "within a vacuum." They knew even back then that an intervening medium will effect the light. But Einstein and so many others, can be proven today to be correct- at least for dates up to around 10 or 12 billion years.

I have yet to find anyone, including YECs who will try and say that there is solid cessium between Earth and the nearest galaxy. They just bring up these things and then withold crucial data from you in order to deceive. Sorry, but I've been debating these guys for more than a decade. There's not one YEC (including those with "ministries") on the circuit who hasn't been found out to be involved in some sort of deliberate falsification or twisting of the facts. It's a money making charade. And sometimes it doesn't even take that much money.

Now Prax, you are being far too cynical in ascribing motives to those who you may have had discussions with in the past. Let go of the bitterness.*

*See my post earlier this evening where I did the same thing with "ultra cons."

Your question actually gets into the old Victorian "Omphalos Debate," known more popularly as "Did Adam Have a Belly Button?"

Obviously Adam had no need for a belly button, so did he have one? In other words, how far would God go to make Adam look like a full grown human being without actually being deceptive? Most of us have physical scars from falling down as children. Did God give Adam a cut on his knee to represent the "time" he fell down as a child?

Did Adam have the arterial sclerosis of a 30 year old man? (Many young earth creationists put forth the idea that Adam was 30 when he was created to begin his "ministry" at the same "age" as Jesus had begun His). In any event, did Adam's veins look like they had been pumping blood for 30 years (or however "old" he was?) Did Adam have the mirco fissures and wear patterns on his teeth equivalent to an adult human? A forensic investigator can come pretty close to guessing your age by the microscopic wear patterns.

Applying these types of questions to the "scars" on the earth, how far was God going to carry this "appearance of age" deception? And deception is exactly what it amounts to.

Not only did "God create rocks that appear to be billions of years old" but He put the remains of once living creatures inside those rocks. And not just their remains, He made it "appear" that these creatures had walked about leaving footprints. They breeded. They ate one another. Were these creatures ever "alive" or were they planted by Satan or planted by God to "test" our faith? Those were explanations that used to be quite popular before the late 1960's when space travel and other scientific progress put pressure on the fundamentalists to come up with something better.

Some of the oldest rocks on earth are sandstones in Australia. They consistantly test out to around 3 billion years old. That's their "chemical age" (really atomic). But these sandstones are made up of sand crystals that are smooth. The individual crystals are smooth. That means, as silicates they formed the way we observe silicates forming today through the gradual seperation of silicates from heavier minerals in slow cooling granite domes. The granite dome, mountainlike in size, was then ground down by erosion and this sand is the result. Later, the sand crystals lithified in a chemical process whereby the individual crystals formed themselves into a different kind of rock - this time sandstone.

That's a lot of work for nothing if God was only trying to pull a fast one on us. But then, I have found Him to be of quite a different character than the "deciever" that many of my brethren have tried to persuade me of. He is true. We are only beginning to understand how true.

I've always suspected as much.

call me crazy but i believe the Bible, and have faith in God, so creation is according to scripture, my mind is filled with enough nonsense allready dont have time for the foolish theory of evolution, dt:tease

That is the "appearance of age" argument and it has many problems. First of all, it is non-falsifiable meaning you can't prove it's wrong. Using this same logic, how do we know we ALL didn't come into existence 2 seconds ago complete with a lifetime of memories and the illusion that we are our present age?
Also, God cannot lie. If something has a HISTORY to its age, such as the rings on a tree, for God to have created that tree would mean he "lied" to us about its past. Now Jesus DID create wine, which is an aged product (I notice that a few people brought this up who in other discussions will argue that it was non-alcoholic, but I digress...) but it had no history. Just as Adam was created older then a newborn but his internals would have shown him to be as young as a newborn as well. No blemishes from having grown up -since he never did.

The 1997–2005 RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) research project at the Institute for Creation Research (co-sponsored by the Creation Research Society) demonstrated that creationists could support a larger-scale collaborative research effort, particularly if it delivered significant breakthroughs on a key challenging issue. The primary focus of this research effort was the radioactive methods for dating rocks that supposedly yield age estimates of millions and billions of years and thus provide support for the claimed multi-billion year age for the earth.

Because of the RATE research results, the long-age radioactive methods for dating rocks can now be more easily demonstrated to often be faulty, since there are problems with the three crucial assumptions on which they are based:

1. There are uncertainties as to the absence or presence of daughter atoms (atoms left after decay) when the rocks formed, because there is much evidence of the rocks having inherited daughter atoms that were not formed by radioactive decay in those rocks.
2. There is abundant evidence of widespread “open-system” behavior of parent and daughter atoms. Rocks are often contaminated with extra parent and daughter atoms produced apart from radioactive decay. Parent and daughter atoms are also removed by various geologic processes (for example, leaching by fluids) subsequent to the rocks forming.
3. Nuclear decay rates have now been demonstrated to have not always been constant.

Much research, even reported in the conventional scientific literature, has found that rocks of known age often yield erroneously old radioactive age estimates because either one of the first two assumptions, or both, can be demonstrated to be false. And if the radioactive “clocks” have not always “ticked” at the currently measured slow rates but were grossly accelerated in the past, then these radioactive dating methods cannot be used to provide reliable age estimates for rocks. After all, if these “clocks” don’t work on rocks of known ages, how can they be trusted on rocks of unknown ages? To be sure, there is a systematic trend of radioactive age estimates for rocks according to their positions in the geologic record, but this would be expected if nuclear decay was grossly accelerated systematically when the rock layers were forming. For example, rocks laid down early in the Flood would yield older ages than rocks laid down later during the Flood because the earlier rocks would have experienced more accelerated radioactive decay.

The meaning of ‘day’ in Genesis 1 is defined by the context there — the Hebrew word for day, yôm, is used with the words ‘evening’ and ‘morning’, and the days are numbered (first day, second day, etc.). Whenever yôm is used in such a context, it is always an ordinary day, never a long period of time. The meaning of the days of creation as ordinary days is also affirmed by Exodus 20:8–11, where God told the Israelites to work for six days and rest on the seventh because God had made all things in six days and rested on the seventh. For more information, see other articles in Q&A: Genesis under ‘Days of Creation’. http://www.answersingenesis.org/home...aq/genesis.asp

The good old Institute! Based on their YEC position, it feels like I am trying to debate someone who is trying to prove Santa Clause when talking about their points.
Radiometric dating has proven EXTREMELY reliable and different methods been redundantly used to back up their results. As well as NON-radioactive measurements such as ice cores, tree rings, shifts in magnetic polarity in earth samples from deep underground.
In the same way distance measurements have been confirmed through normal dopler methods as backed up by good old high school math triangulation which can actually be used to measure star distances up to a couple of hundred thousand light years.

Good point! When I teach "Search For Truth" Bible Study I bring this out and usually I get questions about it. I researched it...w/o giving a bunch of scriptures, here is what I discovered.

God is the source of ALL LIGHT (not the sun or moon). I also believe that the light that shone before the sun and moon were created eminated from God Himself. As proof of this, consider that when we get to the New Jerusalem (heaven, if you will) John writes in Revelation "the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it, for the Glory of God did light it and the Lamb is the light thereof." When God said, "Let there be light" I believe that light came from the very presence of God Himself, lighting all things with the light of His Presence. Later on He made the Sun.

Just my take on it.

Well the hebrew word can simply mean an indefinite period of time...from what I understand and so them perhaps evening and morning are simply referring to the beginning and ending of acts of God on that day

See this is my point. Im not talking about a mere appearance for the sake of looking a certain way. Let me give an example of light and the universe

We see now the light from many bodies that would have taken millions of years to reach here.

Let's assume God created all things. He also created the Universe (expanding or not) with those stars and other bodies far far away. But he wanted us to be able to see them NOW for certain things or reasons...maybe just to admire his creation, whatever.

So God speeds UP the light...or he reduces the time or whatever. It's not a mere apparence. It's very real. It's not an illusion for the sake of fooling Atheists. That is the wrong conclusion.

Remember if God really is all powerful then perhaps he can make a million years of actual time happen or occur in a breadth of time. Again that is not a mere apparency of something. It will look old because it IS old. Im not saying He made it LOOK old. Im saying it really IS that old chemically.

It does not require God to be a liar either. That assumes a motive that was meant to deceive us.

Naw man, he's "gone to prepare us a place".

Yeah, and I'm thinking that if they were to include the Bible in their theory, a lot of those missing items would be explained. Of course.... thats the reason I started this thread.

It seems we agree here. Its good to know that I'm not the only one thinking this. Not many churches talk in depth about this sort of thing.

All one has to do is go back a few hundred years when the "church" held the official view that the sun circles the earth rather then the other way around. After all the bible "clearly" seemed to indicate that the Earth was the center of the Universe. After all why would God put the Earth anywhere else?
I think in 50 to a hundred years people will look back and think the same thing about THIS debate as we do NOW about the Earth vs Sun centric solar system.
I still remember some people during the 70's who thought dinosaurs were tricks of either the devil or humanistic scientists.

Now, all this hyar fancy talk is really jest a buncha big words for kinda exactly what I been believin fer several years. The way I sees it is.....
God made it, and a form of evolution is what he used to make it.
Now, if it took him 6 24hour periods or 6 billion years, who knows, But evedence leads me to believe (since "time" is nothing to God) he took his own good time doing it and it was described in the Bible as "Days" as a period of time, not a literal 24 hr period.

Thanks for taking the time to post all you have.
I am interested in seeing your opinions of the flood, and how that compares to sciences view.

Your claims to be an exclusive repository for the true understanding of the Bible are rather incredible. Do you really think that the Church had gotten everything in Genesis wrong for 2,000 years until the sudden "revelations" of the new fundamentalist movement of the 19th century?

You're pushing a novelty here. That's a pretty foolish thing to do with the Word of God. I'd call you "crazy" because you don't believe the Bible and apparently don't have much faith in God. Sorry, but the Word of God is true and your devotion to passing fads is will only hurt those who depend upon you - your children and your local church.

Go back and look at my post on the speed of light. It is an involved discussion and just to get things going without posting a book length article I obviously left a lot of things out.

Another thing to remember is that through spectrographical analysis of the light we can see chemical processes taking place within the stars that are millions of light years away. This process, called Nucleosynthesis, happens at a predictable rate based upon the star's mass. The larger the star, the faster it's rate and the shorter its "life span." A smaller star like our sun is stable over a much longer life span than a huge star like Sirius, the "Dog Star."

We observe the processes and they are like the "tree rings" of the individual star. Of course God "could have" created the stars with an appearance of age, but why the deception? He carried the "deception" so far that we are seeing things today that no human being has ever seen. Did God really pound the surface of Pluto 6,000 years ago just so He could fool a single generation of humans? Yes, He could - but why would He? What is suggested about the character of such a "God."

Also, from my experience many of the people who promote these "deceptions" by God are deceivers themselves. Just look at how the YEC's hero "Dr. Dino," Kent Hovind and his wife thought that it was Okay" to decive the IRS. Both are currently sitting in Federal prisons crying about being "persecuted." No, they just lied repeatedly on their tax forms. Of course it's easy for them to believe that it was okay to deceive the IRS - their God is deceiving scientists. They're character just follows the character of their "god."

You might want to watch how you say that.
It comes across as if you are downing "their God" as well as them.
Now just because someone doesn't understand God, or has a bazaar interpretation of his word does not mean that the God they believe in is any other than the one true God.

And if you are talking about God, its never good to speak negatively of him, I think you'd agree.

The people might be kooks, but that doesn't mean that God is, or that they believe in some false god.

Just a though.

Hi slave4him, thanks for posting. My intial response when I see ICR material is the embarassment that I felt when I used to promote this stuff. I started out on this topic many years ago as a YEC who was simply trying to understand the "Age of the Earth" debate. I was involved in full time ministry at the time so naturally my research was coming out in my preaching as well. I had to do a lot of catching up to even understand most of the questions that were being put forth.

The RATE program began after it was pointed out repeatedly by "evolutionists" that the YEC's arguments on radioactive decay rates were all based upon a deliberate twisting of a footnote in a Univ. textbook by ICR staff. The footnote dealt with the proper methods in collecting samples for testing. For example, if you visit a Hawaiin volcano and take up a lava sample that was known to have been deposited 100 years ago - you should collect only lava from that flow. To instead collect a xenolith (a rock "from elsewhere" that was carried along by the flow) and claim that your sample is "100 years old" is to be intentionally deceptive.

Of course after reading that, the ICR staff immediately went out collecting xenoliths from a variety of places. Hawaii, Mount Saint Helens, etc. I have a pic at home of ICR "scientists" gleefully picking out gravel from a mudflow at Mount Saint Helens. They then shipped the gravel "samples" to a lab and got back dates in the millions of years. Yet the mudflow was created in 1981. They trumpeted that for 20 years before they were called "liars" enough times that they had to go back to the drawing board.

The RATE, program was the result of that. I'm breaking this post up to avoid overwhelming folks with too much info at once. In the next post we'll take about RATE. But for starters, remember that RATE was necessary because ICR staff had been caught repeatedly in a lie.

... but a very execellent thought. Point well taken.

It's hard not to get caught up in the language of the debate. Reading the "creationist" literature and talking with them, they will often resort to some rather nasty things themselves. As a believer myself I find that I am often defending the work of "unbelieving" scientists. This sometimes awkward position makes me feel compelled to often point out that "the God of the Bible" doesn't necessarily fit the description of those who claim to be speaking for the Bible.

I lost a very close personal friend a few years back because I simply questioned some things he had said in a book he had just published. "Email me," he said and he gave me his email address. So I emailed him a short list of things that he had apparently gotten wrong or that he had failed to attribute to their correct sources. (YECs use a Hare Krishna published book called Forbidden Archeology for much of the "Age of the Earth" arguments but won't cite that book for obvious reasons).

My friend's response looked something like this: HEY! WHy aRe yOU eMailinG me? I don't ELEVEN KN0W HoW T0 TYPE??

He then went on to say, "I'm trying to be nice here..." then he ceased to be very nice at all. That's the way these people are. Their livelihoods are dependant upon a scam. When you expose their scam you threaten their money tree and more importantly their ego.

Following up on the RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) research project at the Institute for Creation Research

Your post sounded like boiler plate: simply Googling one phrase at random shows that you cut-and-pasted the entire post from http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-.../features/rate . This is Ken Ham's ministry. Even though this is an informal forum- a post which consists entirely of cut-and-paste from another website deserves a link back to the source.

If your idea of "exchange" is to simply cut and paste other people's words, then I'm left with the impression that you really don't have much interest in the discussion. Hit and run cut-and-paste. Sad.

However,

Here's some questions brought up by the fraudulent RATE project. Despite your (or shall we say Ken Ham's?) glowing report on the project - it failed to make any waves whatsoever even among those who love to argue this kind of stuff.

1. "Why hasn't Dr. Humphreys ever published a full article of his work in an authentic peer-reviewed science journal under the scrutiny of world experts on gas diffusion in solids rather than YEC magazines and pamphlets that are willing to accept just about any groundless fantasies and speculations as long they seem to support their biblical agenda?"

* Dr. Humphreys is the "larger-scale collaborative research effort" that you and Ken Ham cite in your original post. That's right, basically one guy.

2. "Applying the proper non-biased equation and two standard deviations to the results in Table III of Humphreys et al. (2004, p. 8) yields a ridiculous "creation date" of 6,000 ± 4,600 years. Does Dr. Humphreys realize that his results indicate that "creation" may have occurred as recently as 600 AD?"

3. "Why did the RATE committee hire a Hebrew language scholar to make sure that their results "stay on course" (Morris, 2000, p. viii)? Since when do real research centers and committees allow their results to be screened by a religious or political commissar?"

4. "How is "accelerated radioactive decay" not just another example of the Omphalos and "god-of-the-gaps" fallacies?"

5. "As admitted in Humphreys (2005) and Humphreys et al. (2004, p. 5), why did Dr. Humphreys never bother to have the zircons in the 750-meter sample sorted by size and the a values of the zircons measured when accurate values of "a"* are critical in calculating the "dates" with equations 13-14 and 16 in Humphreys et al. (2003a)? How is Dr. Humphreys practicing good science by taking shortcuts and not carefully measuring ALL of his parameters?"

*"a" is the variable in the equation that represents the size of the crystal and its uranium and lead isotope ratios.

6. "How and when were the "typos" related to the helium measurements (Q values) in Gentry et al. (1982a) discovered? Were the original laboratory notes consulted to correct the typographical errors? If not, how were they reliably corrected? Were the values corrected independently of any of Dr. Humphreys' results or were the values "corrected" to comply with Dr. Humphreys' results?"

* This one is a biggie. Essentially, due to typos that were discovered in an earlier paper that Humphrey relied heavily upon, all of his "findings" are suspect.

** All questions are those of Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D. of the Univ. of Kentucky (Go 'Cats!) and his whole article is avalable here. Notes set off with an "*" are my words.