Evolution and the Bible. Confirm or contradict?

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by RandyWayne

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.

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.

[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 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.

[meBNme]

Originally Posted by pelathais

...
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.

Yes, unfortunately, truth and tradition often clash.
people think that just because they have the truth about the Godhead, and salvation, that everything else they believe must be true to.
Or that nothing else matters, subjects like this are unimportant time wasters.

Whatever happened to diving into Gods word and discovering brand new things that you never knew? Wonderful new mysteries just waiting to be revealed. But no, we cant go into something that might rock the boat of our understanding.

My Thanks to all who are contributing to this thread!!!

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by pelathais

Of course God "could have" created the stars with an appearance of age, but why the deception?

Again I am not talking about an apparence of age. Im talking about actual age. As with light. Im not talking about age. Im talking about speed. We know the speed of light. Based on that we can know how long it would take light to reach us from a certain star. That is constant. Im not saying God faked that. Im saying God could have made it so the light was already reaching us. That's not deception. Deception is the intentional intent to deceive someone. It still takes the same amount of time NOW for the light to reach us. Im not saying that was changed. Im speculating in order to make a point that God could have made that light from nothing, already hitting the earth. It still takes light that long to travel. The planets are still that far away.

You keep saying deception as if I agree with you this implies deception. Look, if I were able to plant a tree and chemically make it grow in a week into a huge huge huge tree...to all eyes it would look like a very old tree. That would ONLY be deception if I said "Well it is a very old tree".

But Im not even saying that. With many things Im saying God created it in a bubble where time and light..everything dependent on time was super speeded up by God. The results being that the earth DID infact age billions of years, but within a short period of "time". The earth really IS that old. Im not saying it just looks that old.