Evolution and the Bible. Confirm or contradict?

[meBNme]

Originally Posted by Praxeas

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 :-)

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.

[meBNme]

Originally Posted by RandyWayne

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.

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.

[RandyWayne]

Originally Posted by meBNme

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.

[meBNme]

Originally Posted by pelathais

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.

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.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by DividedThigh

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

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.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Praxeas

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.

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."

[meBNme]

Originally Posted by pelathais

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.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by slave4him

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.

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.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by meBNme

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 bizar interpritation 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.

... 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.

[pelathais]

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.