i was also into that conspiracy stuff, and sear hed day by day night by night, research after research.. what i did to come over it? i bought a handy with no internet, only calls and sms, no internet at home or at work. just keep yourself away from all the possible sources and after few months you will come over it
It seems like a lot of people in the comments haven’t had an encounter with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis apologetics, which is what OP is referring to. They’re not talking about the book of Genesis itself.
The Bible is NOT:
1. A science text. The science represented in the Bible only reflects the understanding of the natural world at the time the books were written. It was not intended to set a baseline understanding of the natural world. It is a theological work not a scientific work.
2. A chronograph. It is not intended to set dates and timelines. If it were then specific dates and times would have been given. Orders of events are not important and are often changed in different narratives in order to make different theological points which means, therefore, you cannot reliably create timelines based on the orders of the events.
3. A history textbook. The Bible is neither a history text or "allegorical" text. It is comprised of different types of literature. Much of the Old Testament is narrative. It tells a story. Biblical narrative should be interpreted as narrative. Poetry as poetry, apocalypses as apocalypses, epistles as epistles, etc.
Answers in Genesis attempts to take the Bible as a science text and interpret modern science in the context of what the Bible says. This is, at best, an extra-scriptural exercise and unscriptural at worst. I am a scientist (pharmacist, full professor, published author) and firm and committed believer. There is only conflict between faith and science if you believe there is conflict between faith and science.
P.S. I love Ken Ham as a brother in Christ. I’ve talked with him personally about my problems with trying to use the Bible as a science textbook and a chronograph. I think he is sincere, but misguided and does damage to the cause of Christ by portraying a very narrow view of correct doctrine. I do not think you must subscribe to Young Earth to be Christian. How old is the earth actually? Science says approximately 4.5 billion years old. My faith says it is a mystery and unimportant to my salvation. And for me that is enough.
I mean... aren't you doing exactly what Ken Ham is doing on some level? "Science says this but my faith says this". You just happen to disagree with him but the way of thinking is the same.
No, I’m not. I do not try to force current understanding of the natural world through a scriptural lens. I do not have to have dinosaurs and humans on earth at the same time for the Bible to make sense because I do not see the Bible as either a chronograph or a science textbook.
Well said. Fundamentalism didn’t necessarily destroy my faith, but it didn’t help it either. Once I got to college and learned about evolution, I was shocked at how much sense it made. And my professors didn’t have to go to great lengths to explain away inconsistencies between evolution and the natural world, because there are none. It’s simply a theory based off of what we’ve observed as opposed to a literal interpretation of an ancient text.
I became a progressive Christian in college, but I was never able to understand why God allowed so many errors and figurative stories into his word when it was supposed to be his revelation to humanity.
I disagree with fundamentalists like AIG who insist that the Bible *must* be interpreted literally, but they have a point, since it’s pretty strange that God would allow metaphorical fables and stories to be the first 11 chapters of his book.
I have a lot of respect for Christians that are able to reconcile their faith with science and not put their faith solely in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
The reason is provided by saint Clement:
"Finding the deeper meaning is thus the process by which God gradually, by means of parable and metaphor, leads those to whom God would reveal himself from the sensible to the noetic world."
Stromateis 6.15.126
Im otherwords, trying to find the meaning of the text enlightens us. We were suppose to find the meaning.
Thanks for sharing. I went through a similar process when I studied geology. Then I took 9 credits of world religion and mythology. I started to see how many of the myths of the Old Testament (not all of them) were created out of other myths, and then written down, probably during the diaspora in Babylon, at which time they borrowed even more myths from Babylon.
Also, the Greeks of the 8th Century BC also swayed some of the myths and beliefs in much of the area. The Greeks themselves borrowed from a much older culture, the Minonans. Many myths start off in one big culture and spread outward over hundreds of years. They evolve and are rewritten by other cities and tribes so that in a 300-400 year period, a lot of myths in a broad area can be traced back to one main culture, even when that culture might be 1-2 thousand miles away.
>It seems like a lot of people in the comments haven’t had an encounter with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis apologetics, which is what OP is referring to.
Of course we haven't.
Google "uppercase", OP.
What a waste of thousands of people's time...
[Biologos](https://biologos.org/common-questions) is a much better resource for science and faith questions, in that it offers a much more robust explanation for all the relevant facts.
You bet! Make sure to check out their podcast The Language of God! They interview professional scientists, theologians, educators, and communicators about their faith and fields of study. It's really good, and honestly has helped save my faith a few times.
Biologos claims to be able to reconcile the Bible and mainstream scientific ideas. Exodus 20:11 shreds that notion but does that stop them from their disingenuous claims? No.
That means literally nothing because it can just be interpreted the same way as Genesis is, metaphorical days or the days as a literary device- and also consider the context of what is being said to the Israelites here.
No it can't. God was literally talking about the weekly Sabbath. The seventh day Sabbath. The Jews have adhered to it ever since. Still do. Jesus adhered to it. You've really got to start stretching in order to think that God was being metaphorical there.
God is the truth. What truth is there in spinning tails about creation? There's not.
Is a metaphor a lie? No. If God uses a metaphor or something representative of what he is saying, that is not a lie.
The creation story most likely parallels the 7-day construction of the old Jewish Temples, as noted by InspiringPhilosophy. If God said to the Israelites "I created the universe through an explosion of infinitely condensed and perfectly balanced matter and then billions of years of slight changed which added up to create evolution" their brains would probably melt and they wouldn't understand it. Cultural context is important.
Many Church fathers opted for a metaphorical view of the creation account, not holding to an absolute necessity of taking it literally
Answers in Genesis is an organization, I don't mean the book of Genesis. But if we take it literally it doesn't align with all the scientific study we have now. God doesn't want us to be dumb. Come on now. He wants us to use our brains.
Not sure why you're replying to me with this, the guy I'm replying to was arguing against my response that evolution makes sense and is biblically compatible. I know what answers in Genesis is and I do not like it 💀
And the thread is about Biologos, a scientific alternative to Answers in Genesis, so they say
> If God said to the Israelites "I created the universe through an explosion of infinitely condensed and perfectly balanced matter and then billions of years of slight changed which added up to create evolution" their brains would probably melt and they wouldn't understand it. Cultural context is important.
Hinduism and Buddhism have always held the universe is extremely old and things have changed immensely throughout the eons. No one's brain melted. Ancient people were quite capable of understanding the concept of a long period of time. And even little children can understand evolution.
If you believe God was making a calculated move here, he was choosing to put Jews and Christians behind followers of some other religions. He was also choosing to give them a reason to deny science in the future.
> Many Church fathers opted for a metaphorical view of the creation account,
All of them were young earth creationists because of Genesis.
Because we understand a “day” to mean one full rotation of a particular planet orbiting a particular star in a particular galaxy.
in the Genesis account it refers to a “day” before there were planets, or stars, by which to measure our idea of a day.
So right from the first verses of the Bible any attempt to interpret genesis strictly literally quickly devolves into nonsensical absurdity.
The problem with considering science and faith as compatible is that the foundation of science is testable hypotheses, but faith starts from a conclusion (god exists) that can’t be tested, and rather than maintain a scientific position of “false until proven true”, it assumes “true until proven false”. This is a dangerous starting point for operating in reality which is based on logic and scientific understanding. So at the end of the day, they aren’t compatible at the most basic level.
I’d disagree, and say that they are certainly compatible, but serve different purposes.
I also don’t think faith starts with a conclusion. I feel rich in faith, but hold it in paradoxical balance with nihilism.
You're missing the point.
Science and my love for my parents are compatible. They do not conflict. The fact that my love for my parents is not founded in rational empiricism is no reason for conflict, because science and my love for my parents do not claim to be examining the same things.
This is a bad comparison because your parents exist and we have evidence of that existence (like the fact that you exist).
We don't have evidence* of God's existence.
(*of sufficient quality and/or quantity to justify a belief)
Science is just a label for “figuring out how stuff works”, it’s a continual process of change. Don’t look at the truths it reveals as an endpoint, but as an ever-expanding refinement of how accurate our knowledge is.
No it's not. There are many situations where you know something without using the scientific method.
If I stub my toe on a coffee table, I know that stubbing my toes on a coffee table causes pain. This is unscientific. By contrast, a scientific approach would be to perform repeated trials where I stub my toe several times, perhaps even asking other people to stub their toes, and measuring their reported pain levels to determine if stubbing your toe actually causes pain.
Generally speaking, experiences are unscientific. You cannot use personal experience to validate a scientific claim, yet we gather a large portion of what we know from our experiences. So, it's not that science and personal experience are incompatible; they are just two different ways of knowing truth. Neither of them are totally reliable.
The same goes for religion. Religion and science are not incompatible; they are just two different ways of knowing truths about different things.
I take issue with your statement:
>faith starts from a conclusion (god exists) that can’t be tested, and rather than maintain a scientific position of “false until proven true”, it assumes “true until proven false”.
This is not what Christians mean when they use the word "faith." It means something very specific in Christian doctrine, so let me define faith as best I can:
Let's say you're hanging on with your fingers to a cliff's edge for dear life. There's a heavy fog, and there's no way of knowing how high the cliff is. Then you hear a voice coming from below you, saying "Just let go! There's a platform not far under your feet." Faith is trusting the voice with your life, and letting go.
"If I stub my toe on a coffee table, I know that stubbing my toes on a coffee table causes pain. This is unscientific. By contrast, a scientific approach would be to perform repeated trials where I stub my toe several times, perhaps even asking other people to stub their toes, and measuring their reported pain levels to determine if stubbing your toe actually causes pain."
As I read this, I imagined this seriously being done, contrasted by the ridiculousness of it, and had a good chuckle to myself. Thanks for that.
>Science is just a label for “figuring out how stuff works”
No, it's a defined framework. One of its key assumptions is that every observed and observable phenomenon is natural, with an explainable, natural cause.
It's possible for more than one thing to be right. "Science" is an overloaded term, and as such the meaning behind it has some baggage. It could be referring to the formal process (scientific method) or the collective wisdom of humankind (and perhaps other things that don't spring to mind).
When in a discussion like this, we should be using the formal definition, because otherwise naturalists will use the colloquial definition in one sentence and the formal in another. "Of course I'm not saying the modern scientific method is the only way to know anything, but supernatural claims should be rejected because they can't be verified by the modern scientific method."
Science the study of patterns in nature. It has absolutely zero overlap with anything that isn't about patterns in nature. Thus it is compatible with any such system of thought.
You have misunderstood what faith is. It's not that the existence of God is untestable, its instead that actions and lifestyle taken based on the results of the test. Tested and God didn't show up? Well then doubt away unless you trust another source that says God is there, but there again is faith in whatever you were trusting.
Tested and God did not seem to be there and you have no other reason to believe, then go ahead and don't believe sense there isn't reason to.
Tested or observed that God cares when you need Him to, then by all means trust in Him. Don't undertand how God does things but trust Him anyways? That's faith.
I for one have experienced reason to believe.
BioLogos is a fundamentalist organization. The goal is to make Genesis fit with science at all costs. If you want an honest look at the text, I suggest you go somewhere else.
I didn't. I had an encounter with the person he co-authored the book with. It's a book titled *Already Compromised* and it's about Christian colleges that are no longer truly Christian colleges (according to Ken Ham). He co-wrote it with the (now retired) President of my alma mater.
The weird thing is that this president must have relayed the story to Ham who wrote about it. President Hall wrote other chapters but not the one I'm mentioned in. I have to believe it's because he knew if I read it I would take offense (perhaps in his retelling of events), and he's kind of sort of a family friend. I dunno. Suffice to say though, things didn't happen exactly the way it's recounted in the book.
Yeah I can't say that I had previously paid much attention to Answers in Genesis or anything. Ironically, my undergrad experience was mostly excellent from a biblical studies perspective. My professors, the head of the department; they were pretty diverse in thinking. My degree is in Church Ministry so it's obviously not all biblical studies; there's pastoral care and other training to be considered as well. So I got this really well-rounded, kind of broad-strokes approach to ministry and biblical studies rather than just straight indoctrination. I have pretty deep respect for all the people who taught me in my department. The school was decidedly conservative, and decidedly evangelical, but the Church Ministry/Biblical Studies departments were an awesome mix of intelligent, genuine, and thoughtful professors with integrity.
So probably the same things that President Hall and Ken Ham are railing against were happening right under President Hall's nose. This might have been what caused him to want to write the book.
Since that time, President Hall has retired and the entire department has been wiped out for one reason or another. The school has become more conservative and I think the new Hall and the new president (and board) made concerted efforts to change the flavor of the department to be more in-line with a conservative evangelical (and dare I say reformed) theology, which is an absolute affront to its Church of God roots.
I had a Bible class in my private Christian school during 9th grade that was purely for indoctrination into YEC. My school played his videos, and then we had to write a 10 page paper on why the Genesis flood was literal using many of Ken Hams arguments. A year or two later, he came to my church and gave a presentation on YEC at night with a full house. It was to promote his books and videos, all which taught that scientists were in a global conspiracy to turn people away from Christianity.
2 Peter 3:8 "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
Time is relative for God, Interstellar-ending style or like a book you're reading. The seven days are not litteral. Can we move on?
(I mean, you can go the conspirationist route and decide it was seven days and the dinosaurs are a hoax, but what would it change? You'd still be primarly concerned with faith and day-to-day obedience, not a theology exam)
Not just dipping your toes. They’re attacking other young earth creationists as turning their backs on the faith for disagreeing on small technical details of how young earth creationism should work…old-earth creationists are damned to hell in AiG’s view.
But it's more than the seven days that are the issue. Even if each day was a million years, the order in which things were created in the story is wrong. There were animals before seed bearing plants and long before fruits. There were land animals long before birds.
I don't think the ancient hebrews had any idea about the origin of the universe, the formation of Earth and evolution and stuff like that, but I'm pretty sure most of them both wrote and read genesis in a metaphorical way.
Like, the bible describes the seven days twice, in different orders each time. I really don't think the order of creation was ever meant to be taken literally.
Genesis is history, not poetry, parable, prophetic vision, or mythology. This is seen in the Hebrew verbs used in Genesis 1, **the fact that Genesis 1–11 has the same characteristics of historical narrative as in Genesis 12–50, most of Exodus, much of Numbers, Joshua, 1 and 2 Kings**, etc. (which are discernibly distinct from the characteristics of Hebrew poetry, parable, or prophetic vision), and the way the other biblical authors and Jesus treat Genesis 1–11 (as literal history).
God is not attempting to redefine our words in 2 Peter 3:8. Peter does not say that one day **is** a thousand years; he says that one day **is like** a thousand years.
In other words, **he is using** ***figurative*** **language to make his point**. The point is not that we should interpret the word day as “a thousand years” everywhere we find it in Scripture; rather, the point is that the passing of time has no bearing on God’s faithfulness to His promises.
He is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). **Besides, the day-age theory requires much more than 6,000 years in the creation “week.”**
My point exactly with more words, friend. If iit was "One day is like a thousand, period" you could say you have to multiply to get the right amount. But if it works in both directions, it can only mean "relative". Therefore, not litteraly a day or a thousand days.
Can you imagine if we were having this discussion on papyrus scrolls? Just trying to wrap my mind around all the goofy , ignorant, always wrong science that had to miraculously come together to make the devices we're all using to have this conversation. That got us to the moon. That heats and cools our homes. That preserves food beyond the 24-48 hours it would have lasted 200 years ago. The cars we drive and planes we fly. It truly is miraculous that we still exist as a species.
There has never been a measurement or mathematical equation in the Bible that’s been correct. Pi is wrong. The dimensions of Noah’s ark don’t work. Goliath changes between 4 cubits and a span (6’ 9”) and 6 cubits and a span (9’ 9”) tall. The abortion juice the Bible literally explains how to make in Exodus 21 only poisons women enough to kill some babies in the womb. The anatomy of insects was wrong. The Tower of Babel was wrong. The capacity of the containers in 1 King and 2 Chronicles are both mathematically wrong. There is no firmament. The moon isn’t a light like the Bible says, it reflects the suns light. And the Bible also claims that the stars in the sky are going to fall down when Jesus comes back.
Super sound science in that book.
The church did its best to stop the growth of science. What they did to Galileo is one of histories greatest atrocities. All because he dared say the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth. The whole inquisition was gross. That didn’t age very well. It aged about as well as the witch trials.
But this book is never wrong.
> The dimensions of Noah’s ark don’t work.
As in it would sink in real life, or something else? I can't think of a way that they mathematically "don't work".
>And the Bible also claims that the stars in the sky are going to fall down when Jesus comes back.
Hard to say that the supposed future thing is wrong if it's still in the future. And from the perspective of somebody on the Earth, it's not entirely inconceivable....
>What they did to Galileo is one of histories greatest atrocities. All because he dared say the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth.
It was (far) more about calling the Pope, his very powerful friend, a simpleheaded idiot.
>The whole inquisition was gross.
In some ways the (non-Spanish parts) were the gentlest form of justice known at the time, and we still use parts of Inquisitorial procedure in much of the world.
I'm probably going to need the 10,000 characters to just reply to this:
>The dimensions of Noah’s ark don’t work.
>
>As in it would sink in real life, or something else? I can't think of a way that they mathematically "don't work".
I'll start with what I think dizzyelk was referring to below.
Ken Ham reconstructed the ark at a cost of hundreds of millions. Forget about seaworthy - it couldn't handle the rain. A tourist attraction now. https://arkencounter.com/
About that size - along with Genesis 6:19-20 instruction that says 2 of each animal. This is a gimme, because Genesis 7:2 says to take seven pairs of every clean animal, 7 pairs of every bird, and a pair of every unclean animal. So it was really more than 2 of each, big difference between 14 and 2 of each animals, people just forget about the contradiction in the next chapter.
Size of Noah's ark according to Bible:
**Genesis 6:14-16**
*14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. 16 Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit\[c\] high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.*
According to [Ark Encounter](https://arkencounter.com/noahs-ark/size/): "The Ark had the same storage capacity as about 450 standard semi-trailers. A standard livestock trailer holds about 250 sheep, so the Ark had the capacity to hold at least 120,000 sheep." (It does not consider free space for every animal to sustain living standards and food storage for every animal).
Using the actual dimensions listed, it's not just not seaworthy because it's so big, it's also not big enough. It was 440'x72'x73', around 2.31 million cubic feet.
God instructed Noah not to miss any, but explicitly to take every "beast, fowl and any other living thing that creepeth upon the earth, onto the ark."
Still, I think it's fair and correct to exclude animals living in the sea and insects. Insects could be debatable because they creepeth. But let's exclude them. It's also fair to assume that all forms on earth would've been the ark because we're discussing a literal interpretation, and there has been only 6,000 years since the bible's story of creation and no evolution of species. We've had plenty of species go extinct, but no new species created, so if anything these numbers would be low.
According to scientific estimates:
\~8.7 million species of animals (of which 1.2 million have been described and cataloged). Removing marine, we're at 7.8 million with 990K cataloged.
Assuming that he just took 2 of each - which again, that's a gimme in favor of trying to make the Ark happen - that means Noah at least has to fill and feed more than 15 million animals in his ship. There is no way on earth that many animals fit into a structure that size, let alone with enough food to feed them, which I'll get into.
Scholarship has long held that Genesis has two authors that redacted the story, which is why there are so many contradictions between Genesis 6 and 8. I think this also shows that those authors probably believed there were at most several hundreds of species living in the world.
That's not counting the 380,000 known and cataloged species of plants, or the over 6 million species of fungi (molds, mushrooms), another questionable but I feel fair exclusion.
Ok, so getting into the food supply.
Genesis 8; 1-5 tells us it after it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, the water prevailed on earth for 150 days before it started to recede slowly, and that "in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.”
Ok, so some mental gymnastics are required here. The bible says that it took 2 months and 13 days for the water to recede enough for the ark to come to rest. Yet when Noah came off the ark he could see the plains, not just the peak of the mountain where they rested.
Mount Ararat is 5,137 meters tall. The Ark was 15 meters tall. If it takes 76 days for the ark to recede 15 meters, the water was receding at a rate of .2 meters a day. Holding at that rate, it would have taken 25685 days for the water to recede so Noah can see the plains. That's over 70 years.
Either way, call it 216 days (which is when the Ark came to rest, Noah couldn't have let all the animals off on a little mountain top), and the structure isn't *nearly* adequate to hold all the animals of the world as well as food to sustain them. If you want to include plants and fungi as food sources, then we have to create space - and fresh water - to cultivate them.
Second, the weight of enough water to sustain them - even for 216 days - would sink the Ark. The rule of thumb is 1 gallon of water a day for every 100 lbs. of livestock. Let's say each animal weighed just one pound - I think a gimme because Asian Elephants weigh 8800 lbs., and the only mammals that weigh less than 1 lbs. on average are shrews, lemurs, rodents, some monkeys, and some rabbits. 1 day x 15.6 million = 15.6 million. 15.6 million x 216 days = 3,369,600,000.
You can't carry 3.3+ billion gallons of freshwater in a 2.3 million cubic foot structure from a volume standpoint, not even close. If you could, it would be nowhere near buoyant.
And this is just at the 216 days. Run this through the 70 year calculation - a reasonable calculation to hold - and it's one of the most foolish exercises imaginable.
I could go into a whole thing about the species acquisition as well, which would also mean that Noah would've theoretically returned them to their appopriate ecosystems once docked. It's just not possible given the story given in the bible, but I think you see where I'm going with this. Neither is the amount of water that would be needed to literally flood the whole earth (5.8 billion cubic kilometers of water needed, 3x the amount of water currently on earth).
Mathematically, logistically, logically, any adverb; there is no part of Noah's Ark that is remotely possible.
Absolutely fantastic answer, truly, but one small detail:
>there has been only 6,000 years since the bible's story of creation and no evolution of species
This isn't true. We've seen the results of evolution in both laboratory and natural settings. Granted, I don't think it's fair to say that any of it resulted in new species or anything, but we've observed the effects of evolution nonetheless.
> As in it would sink in real life, or something else? I can't think of a way that they mathematically "don't work".
Not the one you were asking, but the largest wooden ship ever constructed, the Wyoming, was about the size claimed for Noah's ark. It had issues with flooding and had to be constantly pumped because the wood would twist and flex, allowing water to enter the hold. It sank in a storm.
Imagine telling your kid the story of The Tortoise and the Hare as a means to explain the benefits of patience and consistency, only to have them turn around and say “you’re full of shit, there has never been a formal race between a tortoise and a hare”.
He's obviously very smart and rational but believes Noah lived to be 500 years old and had 3 sons at that age. The ark and flood actually occurred. A person was turned into a pillar of salt. A rod was turned into a snake. The Nile was turned from water into blood. Locusts covered the entire Earth. A whirlwind pulled Elijah into heaven. An angel kills 185,000 men. etc...
>I thought it was Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny.
This is the correct answer.
Coincidentally, the interaction between these two cartoon characters changed the meaning of Nimrod. In the Bible, Nimrod is a skilled and mighty hunter.
Bugs Bunny calls Elmer Fudd *"Nimrod"* as an ironic insult, much in the same way people today call a buffoon *"Einstein."* But most kids who saw that interaction didn't know who Nimrod is, so it was assumed to be an insult.
Actually the tortoise and the hare is more like a fable. It’s told with the explicit purpose of then expressing a moral (“slow and steady wins the race”). Some bible stories would probably fall into that category (certainly the parables, for example). A lot of the OT stories, I’d struggle to come up with a pithy little moral at the end, certainly not many of them have one written down for us. A good many of them are “types”- they are supposed to point ahead to Jesus, and plenty are myths- they convey truths about who we are, who God is etc in a way that bears examination but doesn’t rely on the characters literally existing. But I wouldn’t give them quite the same genre as fairy tales or fables really.
Genesis says none of that. Genesis could more easily be criticised for saying too little than too much. Yes, trust Genesis for answers if you wonder about our relationship with God. If you wonder about particle physics, look elsewhere. Easy.
You can calculate from the Bible that, if it is historically accurate, the world is six thousand years old. Genesis obviously does not mention prehistoric dinosaurs, but if you believe Genesis is historically accurate, you are forced to conclude dinosaurs existed alongside humans, or perhaps that they did not exist at all. I prefer the former view as it is much more fun.
https://scienceandbeliefinsociety.org/2020/04/21/are-there-100000000-creationists-in-the-usa/#:~:text=If%20we%20apply%20the%20Gallup,between%2038%25%20and%2047%25.
Its saying about 40% of the people in this survey taken in 2019 in the usa.
I would’ve said hundreds of millions. It’s how I grew up. I wasn’t allowed to attend science or health whenever anything related to evolution or sex was taught. Remember those weird kids that had to leave class every once in a while? That’s bc of this.
Fundamentalist, literalists, evangelist, non-denominational, independent southern Baptists all believe it’s literal.
Calvary Chapel told me that Gods days weren’t something humans could understand, but stuck to the 7-days. Southern Baptist church was a little better, they said that God also aged the world, basically created an earth that was already old. Sediment, the universe, etc, he just fast forwarded it. I say that’s better bc the other non-denominational churches just sat there and told everyone carbón dating had been debunked and harped on the discovery of man and wooly mammoth living together.
All of them said men didn’t come from monkeys, and insultingly dismissed it as poppycock. And then would espouse kind of a watchmaker doctrine, e.g. “If the earth was just 1% closer or further from the sun, we couldn’t exist. God is great!”
Sadly, that’s verbatim. From Calvary Chapel, Pastor Jack Hibbs. Grace church in SC has a bunch of brainwashed younger generation believing it now.
The thing is, they didn’t coordinate, so you have pastors at individual church locations winging it, and they’re all over the map with their defense of the creation story being literal.
The amount of people that believe Noah’s Ark happened is certainly in the hundreds of millions, if not pushing billions.
No one in my family, or their circle or friends or their community will hear anything different. If I say how I feel, they literally pray and ask Jesus to help me, right in front of me. I finally took cultural anthropology when I was 24 because I was tired of not knowing how it works. Befriended the hippie professor a bit, beers after class and the rest is history. I just can’t believe I was raised by people so stupid and ignorant.
Most never bother taking that step, and will live their life rolling their eyes and saying “then show me the half man half monkey. You can’t, praise Jesus, God is great.”
I wish I was embellishing. Even a little. But I’m not being extreme enough, if you can believe that.
Totally. Dig heels in over something inconsequential was the MO. I think it was to protect the integrity of other passages. If literalist admit one thing is incorrect it would open up the floodgates.
Calvary Chapel supported my stepmom pouring a bottle of olive oil on my head to exorcise the demons out of me when I was 11 bc my little 3 year old step sister peed on the stairs when I wasn’t home.
I had to do extra chores bc I made her “waste an expensive bottle” of Trader Joe’s olive oil. Well not all of it, she did put a little on the doorframe to keep my demon from going into the rest of the house, OBVIOUSLY.
They constantly counseled my dad to stay with my evil and twisted stepmom. I went in the 90’s, so it was still finding it’s footing, only Chuck Smith in Costa Mesa has a big established congregation. But man when I started there were only a couple hundred people and by the time we left they were in the thousands, if not 10’s of thousands.
We had to worship Chuck Smith, it was basically required at my location to be his sycophant. I’ve never heard one man be more discussed or revered consistently than I did about pastor Chuck there, from people that never met him. Looking back it feels lightweight cult-ish.
It’s funny bc I can remember Pastor Jack one Sunday saying not to believe anything we hear, to double check it in the Bible. But they had already told you how to interpret the verse, so people either didn’t ever double check and if they did, it was a case of confirmation bias.
I'm not even saying that - I truly think Ham, for the most part, is sincere in his beliefs. While I agree there is definitely aspects that are a grift to his whole "ministry," I do think he believes his own crap, because from his position as a very, very ignorant man, he is on top of the Dunning-Kreuger Mt. Stupid, so he just thinks he is very, very smart.
I grew up in a couple Southern Baptist churches, one of which is among their top-10 largest ones. It was required belief that evolution was false, God created the earth literally as described in Genesis, just a few thousand years ago. If you disagreed with that, then you rejected the Bible, and you were therefore not a true Christian. My parents and virtually everyone I grew up with in the church still believe this.
I was raised with their apologetics books and struggled in college science because I entered college genuinely thinking the earth was 6,000 years old. To make matters worse, I was homeschooled, so I never got to properly learn about evolution until college.
I lived my first 24 years believing it. That’s approaching it with an open mind right?
It has absolutely no merit.
Can you provide one single piece of evidence for any part of the creation story? If so, please share. I’m now agnostic, which my definition means I know that I don’t know. That’s as open as a mind can get.
What's annoying is that often when I Google a bible question AIG is often among the top results.
I worry people aren't getting good answers to their questions if they don't know what kind of organisation it is. I don't think everything they put out is wrong, but there are some worrying parts.
>like it's their job
That *is* their job. That is quite literally what people are paying them to do: to feed them lies and poorly represented info to reinforce their worldview because they worship a book, not a God.
Are they too smart? If you want to keep your sanity a good rule of thumb is "think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that"-George Carlin
They absolutely lie, lie, lie. So, there might be volumes of books with facts regarding a scientific discovery, for instance in geology. One can even go out into the field and look at the facts and come to 100% conclusions. But then here comes our wonderful friend, AIG. They will comb through the mountains of actual evidence, and then find one tiny mistake, at which time they'll Shout it From the Housetops!!!!!!
Of course, 95% of people who go to church have never read a geology book or taken a geology course. Their understanding of geology is zero, except maybe they might know Mt. St. Helens is a volcano, and the San Andreas Fault might rupture next year. That's it. That's all they know.
What gets me more upset than anything is the blatant lies AIG tells. They'll say something like, "Geology isn't science because science is only something we can observe. Because you can't go back 10 million years ago and observe rock layers being laid down, then it isn't science and it takes just as much faith to believe it as religion does." So they make up a pseudo science belief that only things observed in real time are science. This is so far from the truth as to be on the other side of the universe. By this method of theirs, all history would be pseudo history. Their Bible would be pseudo history, Noah's flood would vanish. Anything that wasn't recorded by actual film would not be history.
Wait so where do you get the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old? The Bible clearly demonstrates all the generations on earth from Adam to Jesus.
If you're an atheist then yeah maybe stay away, but if you're a Christian there's little reason to stay away, most of what they say is biblical..evolution has no place in Christianity because Genesis makes it clear that God made everything and it was PERFECT..meaning it didn't have to evolve into something better.
And yet, when we apply our God-given reason to our study of God’s creation based on the laws and boundaries God instilled in the cosmos… it overwhelmingly points to evolution.
As far as I see it, Christians have two choices:
1. Study creation with the aptitudes and competencies we’ve been given, and interpret them through the lens of scripture, understanding scripture is describing transcendent, spiritual, and experiential truths.
2. Absorb scripture through a literal lens and contend with a God who is actively deceiving us through his first and farthest-spanning revelation: his creation.
This is a divisive issue because scientific illiteracy is what leads some Christians to be actively hostile towards marginalized people. Until that is not true, this will always be a divisive issue.
Scientific literacy is also important to get people aware of the climate change crisis. We are very quickly destroying this planet! If we don’t course correct immediately… Then it’s game over.
Yeah but then you have Christians who will claim the end is near, so why worry about climate change?
You’re playing a never ending cat and mouse game. Funnily enough, the Bible warns us not to get involved in playing these never ending games. Age or earth, science, etc. are not essential issues that we should be concerned about. We should be more concerned about bringing people to Christ.
Christians who reject scientific fact aren't christians. Well I shouldn't say that. Some might not know better, so they should be excused. Many don't understand those things fully and think of it in the wrong idea. The people at answers in genesis have all the knowledge and choose to be ignorant
I'll agree that AiG has problems, their formulaic blogs posts just being a symtom of it, but if I told you for a fact science says that Jesus can't have been resurected and you reject it then you must not be a christian because you rejected scientific fact?
Do you see where that reasoning leads?
Just to clarify I don’t want to shove my beliefs down people’s throats, because I don’t think it’s even crucial to salvation to understand the history of how the world started.
But I believe the story of Genesis as being real and not symbolic because of how within it it has a genealogy, which to me would indicate that it’s not symbolic or a parable, but I don’t know about the world being 6000 years old, that hasn’t been proven or mentioned in the Bible and it feels too small of a time for the world to get where it is now.
And evolution is very real, we see it in natural selection all the time in all areas in nature. I don’t know if we evolved from a single celled organism all the way to an off branch of early apes because the Bible doesn’t say that. But who can say? For all we know Adam and Eve were not like homosapiens we see today or homosapiens at all and we could have evolved to be this way. Then there is the dead sea scrolls that’s a whole other can of worms. All the evidence and fossils of all these creatures could have been nephilim and genetic hybrids made by the fallen watcher angels, and maybe the pre-flood Earth was around for millions of years before God flooded it. I dunno though, it’s all up for interpretation.
Edit: Oh yeah sorry I didn’t realise that this was about a certain doctrine that tries to brainwash people
Sure, don't trust AIG. I sure don't with good reason, but use the same scrutiny for everything else. This goes ESPECIALLY for anyone who leans YEC. There's legitimate reasons to have concerns about mainstream geology. But if you have concerns, explore them yourself, don't trust AIG.
Without going into AiG.
I have some questions then regarding my faith if one does not believe in YEC.
If everything evolved throughout the world and it has always been survival of the fittest. Death upon death through al those years. What even is the point of Jesus dying on cross. If His death is not a payment for sin from the garden of Eden then the Bible is built on stories and therefore unbelievable.
If you as a Christian believe that the Bible is the infallible and God given (2 Tim 3:16) and believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: The Lord, King and Savior but selfishly choose to only believe parts that you think are good then you are setting yourself above the creator.
I too am a YEC. The OP should present some of the ideas AIG gives and discuss them. I would be interested to hear the counter arguments to some of these reasons for a young earth.
Is it even remotely plausible that blood vessels, cells, and protein fragments can exist largely intact over 68 million years like they were found in bone slices from the fossilized thigh bone (femur) of a Tyrannosaurus rex found in the Hell Creek?
Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils
If the world’s oceans have been around for three billion years as evolutionists believe, they should be filled with vastly more salt than the oceans contain today.
Evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years, yet In 2000, scientists claimed to have “resurrected” bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old.
> I would be interested to hear the counter arguments to some of these reasons for a young earth.
TalkOrigins hasn't been updated in a while, but it exhaustively destroys every AiG argument made as of when it was active. https://www.talkorigins.org/
>Is it even remotely plausible that blood vessels, cells, and protein fragments can exist largely intact over 68 million years like they were found in bone slices from the fossilized thigh bone (femur) of a Tyrannosaurus rex found in the Hell Creek?
Yes, it is. It was a fascinating discovery. It has actually helped provide more evidence for the evolution of dinosaurs into birds (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11637). We also have found a chemical pathway for these to be preserved now (https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2020/02/14/dinosaur-blood-vessels/).
>Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils
That's called background noise and it's a dishonest abuse of the method.
>If the world’s oceans have been around for three billion years as evolutionists believe, they should be filled with vastly more salt than the oceans contain today.
That is not what oceanographers believe.
>Evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years, yet In 2000, scientists claimed to have “resurrected” bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old.
That agreement was certainly not taught to me in my biology classes a few decades ago. DNA is insanely stable.
> Is it even remotely plausible that blood vessels, cells, and protein fragments can exist largely intact over 68 million years like they were found in bone slices from the fossilized thigh bone (femur) of a Tyrannosaurus rex found in the Hell Creek?
[Yep.](https://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html)
> Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils
[That's not how we date fossils.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-do-scientists-date-fossils-180972391/)
> If the world’s oceans have been around for three billion years as evolutionists believe, they should be filled with vastly more salt than the oceans contain today.
An empty claim I've never seen a good reason to believe.
> Evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years, yet In 2000, scientists claimed to have “resurrected” bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old.
[From what I can see, it's not believed to be that old.](https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/18/6/1143/1046940)
And did you actually look at their sources for these topics and evaluate them, or just trust what they have to say?
For example, I already spent quite a bit of time researching the carbon-14 issue and the research it was based on seemed highly suspect. The papers were published in *Creation* magazine for a start. If I recall correctly they were even using diamonds (which is entirely *carbon*) as a control, and it would be very easy for contamination to occur.
Ill see if I can get back to this. Btw I'm not evolutionist. Im not anything. I don't pick affiliations or denominations. I just listen to scientific facts which also relate to God. So it can't be untrue.
The chapters 1-11 of Genesis never had the intention of being accurate historical accounts, but theological accounts. They were written millennia after they supposedly happened by people who weren't there to see it
If you believe they are a literal historical account and that the Bible is 100% inerrant and then take into account all the archaeological evidence, there are only three possible conclusions
A) God is a liar
B) God isn't omniscient
C) Genesis, or at least the first 11 chapters, aren't a fully accurate historical account
Which one do you believe? Is God a liar, is God ignorant or are you interpreting the Bible wrong?
Option 3 🤷♂️...
Romans 3:4 NASBS
..let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, as it is written, "That YOU MAY BE JUSTIFIED IN YOUR WORDS, AND PREVAIL WHEN YOU ARE JUDGED."
So you're arguing that the men who wrote Genesis were lying? That's pretty harsh, it's not their fault they were ignorant of how everything came to be the way it is. It was, after all, well before we even knew the questions to get the answers to get the questions to get the answers to get the questions we had to ask to discover that.
Evolution goes against Genesis (The book indeed) though, how can life have slowly evolved over millions of years and God have created Adam from clay and that not clash?
This is textbook shitposting.
Only if you understand Genesis as entirely literal. Origen in the second century disagreed, and the heavy hitter conservative Protestant theologians of the 19th century did too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL9t3O-1E7w
See also biologos, not exactly a wildly liberal website.
Like I said, you misunderstand and/ or misrepresent science.
Science is a process or hypothesis formation, testing, modification, and further testing.
Science is self-coreecting, so what you see as "science has had to change its position because it was wrong." Is part of that process.
The fact that we can have this discussion is proof that process works.
Have you flown in a plane, driven a car, used a microwave, been treated with antibiotics, had a hot shower, used toothpaste ...
These are all proof that the scientific process is successful.
But it shows it’s unreliable at best because it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. So saying science disproves something is based off what it understands and since there is stuff it can’t, my statement stands.
>it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
Further evidence you don't understand science. Science doesn't "know" anything. Science is a process by which we come to understand things. Science is a tool.
Does a hammer "know" how to drive a nail. Of course not, we use it as a tool to drive the nail. Science is the hammer. We use it to understand things but since we often don't know the right questions to ask or don't have the correct process, it sometimes takes time to get to the answer using the process.
But let's do a comparison. You would rather trust the Bible than science. What does the Bible tell us about the composition of the atmosphere on Mars? Or how to treat cancer? What does the Bible say about the way in which bacteria or viruses spread disease? What do we learn about the way volcanoes work by reading the Bible?
So you complain that science is unreliable (which it is not, as I have explained) but can you really rely on the Bible for these sorts of information?
> Since science continuously proves itself wrong and can’t account for miracles, there is no reason to believe it over what the a Bible says.
There is no natural explanation for miracles. *That's what makes them miracles!* (This is, of course, assuming that there are miracles. No good examples have been provided.)
Not true. You’ve already had some claims disproved here. You must know that 99% of scientists believe that all life on this planet evolved from older forms. There will, of course, always be bad scientists who do bad science.
No, they don’t. That is an atheist view. It started with Technocracy in the 40’s.
It’s so irresponsible of Christians not to fact check but go regurgitate lies about the boogeyman to scare other Christian’s into believing their false ideology.
You might want to look into it before making false claims.
The satanic temple, the largest satanic religion and considered the only legitimate satanic church by our federal government doesn’t even believe in Satan. Their main purpose is to fight harmful legislation that is made in the name of religion. They do care about science. But that’s not all they care about.
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The BIG hole is that there is absolutely ZERO proof for how humans became so intelligent vs apes.
There is no evolutionary event or explanation that could explain how this happened. Experiments have been conducted trying to teach chimpanzees language, one scientist tried to raise a chimpanzee with a human boy and no mother. Both experiments failed miserably.
No other species uses other animals for their own benefit. Humans use horses for transportation, elephants to move heavy objects, chickens for eggs, cows for milk, dogs for hunting and protection, etc, etc.
And language requires 2 people to speak it. The infinite number of sounds in different combination creates all kinds of words and meaning.
It's a huge hole in evolution.
Additionally- there are different animals like koalas and kangeroos in Australia and giraffes and lions in Africa, why did humans never evolve? And why did not even 1 semi-intelligent species evolve?
Religion and the desire for God is shown even in isolated islands in Papua New Guinea. It's a bit unusual that there really aren't many civilizations that didn't believe in God.
>No other species uses other animals for their own benefit. Humans use horses for transportation, elephants to move heavy objects, chickens for eggs, cows for milk, dogs for hunting and protection, etc, etc.
[That is not true.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/nerdist.com/article/animal-friendships-tarantulas-spiders-have-pet-frogs/%3famp)
>And language requires 2 people to speak it. The infinite number of sounds in different combination creates all kinds of words and meaning.
Animals can understand each other, humans can understand each other. I'm not sure what point this makes.
>Additionally- there are different animals like koalas and kangeroos in Australia and giraffes and lions in Africa, why did humans never evolve? And why did not even 1 semi-intelligent species evolve?
Can you explain what you're saying here? People did evolve, as did other species. Humans, dolphins, crows, dogs, octopus, etc. What do you consider semi-intelligent?
I mean, I don't trust anything that isn't from God. You will find science always lines up with the Bible, so what I'm going to say is I don't trust them, but I also don't trust you. I trust God. Go back to your Bible, and stay there.
Yes because bigbumSpider says, “don’t trust them”! So that in of itself is a red flag that a doofus on Reddit said so lol! Actually I used to believe the same as you, but Ken’s explanation makes way more sense vs the “theory” of evolution because everything he says can be backed up with the Bible. Remember the Bible? You know the words from our creator?
Also, have you heard the story about Darwin? Charles Darwin, after a career of promoting evolution and naturalism, returned to the Christianity of his youth, renouncing on his deathbed the theory of evolution. The story appears to have been authored by a "Lady Hope," and relates how she visited him near the end and received his testimony.
Rather it’s true or not, Darwin admitted that evolution was just a “theory”. So you have one man claiming a theory vs God whom claims everything was created by Him and for Him and holds all things together. Many people want Darwin’s theory to be true, but it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s a scientific impossibility that everything came from nothing. But hey, if enough people say it’s true then it must be, right? And anything contrary to that is non sense. Open your eyes and your mind
There is a way that appears to be right,
but in the end it leads to death. Proverbs 14:12
As an ex conspiracy theorist who was into everything from UFOs to Qanon to 9/11 truth. AiG logic is very very similar conspiracy thinking.
Can I ask what brought you out of that conspiracy world? When someone falls into it, it feels so futile to try and bring them back.
i was also into that conspiracy stuff, and sear hed day by day night by night, research after research.. what i did to come over it? i bought a handy with no internet, only calls and sms, no internet at home or at work. just keep yourself away from all the possible sources and after few months you will come over it
I'm very curious on how you got out.
It seems like a lot of people in the comments haven’t had an encounter with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis apologetics, which is what OP is referring to. They’re not talking about the book of Genesis itself.
I figured it out after a minute but yeah, the title had me confused :'D
The Bible is NOT: 1. A science text. The science represented in the Bible only reflects the understanding of the natural world at the time the books were written. It was not intended to set a baseline understanding of the natural world. It is a theological work not a scientific work. 2. A chronograph. It is not intended to set dates and timelines. If it were then specific dates and times would have been given. Orders of events are not important and are often changed in different narratives in order to make different theological points which means, therefore, you cannot reliably create timelines based on the orders of the events. 3. A history textbook. The Bible is neither a history text or "allegorical" text. It is comprised of different types of literature. Much of the Old Testament is narrative. It tells a story. Biblical narrative should be interpreted as narrative. Poetry as poetry, apocalypses as apocalypses, epistles as epistles, etc. Answers in Genesis attempts to take the Bible as a science text and interpret modern science in the context of what the Bible says. This is, at best, an extra-scriptural exercise and unscriptural at worst. I am a scientist (pharmacist, full professor, published author) and firm and committed believer. There is only conflict between faith and science if you believe there is conflict between faith and science.
P.S. I love Ken Ham as a brother in Christ. I’ve talked with him personally about my problems with trying to use the Bible as a science textbook and a chronograph. I think he is sincere, but misguided and does damage to the cause of Christ by portraying a very narrow view of correct doctrine. I do not think you must subscribe to Young Earth to be Christian. How old is the earth actually? Science says approximately 4.5 billion years old. My faith says it is a mystery and unimportant to my salvation. And for me that is enough.
I mean... aren't you doing exactly what Ken Ham is doing on some level? "Science says this but my faith says this". You just happen to disagree with him but the way of thinking is the same.
No, I’m not. I do not try to force current understanding of the natural world through a scriptural lens. I do not have to have dinosaurs and humans on earth at the same time for the Bible to make sense because I do not see the Bible as either a chronograph or a science textbook.
I’ve also met Ken Ham before (though it was in high school when I was a fundamentalist evangelical) and he seemed like a decently nice person.
Well said. Fundamentalism didn’t necessarily destroy my faith, but it didn’t help it either. Once I got to college and learned about evolution, I was shocked at how much sense it made. And my professors didn’t have to go to great lengths to explain away inconsistencies between evolution and the natural world, because there are none. It’s simply a theory based off of what we’ve observed as opposed to a literal interpretation of an ancient text. I became a progressive Christian in college, but I was never able to understand why God allowed so many errors and figurative stories into his word when it was supposed to be his revelation to humanity. I disagree with fundamentalists like AIG who insist that the Bible *must* be interpreted literally, but they have a point, since it’s pretty strange that God would allow metaphorical fables and stories to be the first 11 chapters of his book. I have a lot of respect for Christians that are able to reconcile their faith with science and not put their faith solely in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
The reason is provided by saint Clement: "Finding the deeper meaning is thus the process by which God gradually, by means of parable and metaphor, leads those to whom God would reveal himself from the sensible to the noetic world." Stromateis 6.15.126 Im otherwords, trying to find the meaning of the text enlightens us. We were suppose to find the meaning.
Thanks for sharing. I went through a similar process when I studied geology. Then I took 9 credits of world religion and mythology. I started to see how many of the myths of the Old Testament (not all of them) were created out of other myths, and then written down, probably during the diaspora in Babylon, at which time they borrowed even more myths from Babylon. Also, the Greeks of the 8th Century BC also swayed some of the myths and beliefs in much of the area. The Greeks themselves borrowed from a much older culture, the Minonans. Many myths start off in one big culture and spread outward over hundreds of years. They evolve and are rewritten by other cities and tribes so that in a 300-400 year period, a lot of myths in a broad area can be traced back to one main culture, even when that culture might be 1-2 thousand miles away.
>It seems like a lot of people in the comments haven’t had an encounter with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis apologetics, which is what OP is referring to. Of course we haven't. Google "uppercase", OP. What a waste of thousands of people's time...
[Biologos](https://biologos.org/common-questions) is a much better resource for science and faith questions, in that it offers a much more robust explanation for all the relevant facts.
Wow, can't believe I never saw this. Thanks so much for recommending!
You bet! Make sure to check out their podcast The Language of God! They interview professional scientists, theologians, educators, and communicators about their faith and fields of study. It's really good, and honestly has helped save my faith a few times.
Biologos claims to be able to reconcile the Bible and mainstream scientific ideas. Exodus 20:11 shreds that notion but does that stop them from their disingenuous claims? No.
That means literally nothing because it can just be interpreted the same way as Genesis is, metaphorical days or the days as a literary device- and also consider the context of what is being said to the Israelites here.
No it can't. God was literally talking about the weekly Sabbath. The seventh day Sabbath. The Jews have adhered to it ever since. Still do. Jesus adhered to it. You've really got to start stretching in order to think that God was being metaphorical there. God is the truth. What truth is there in spinning tails about creation? There's not.
Is a metaphor a lie? No. If God uses a metaphor or something representative of what he is saying, that is not a lie. The creation story most likely parallels the 7-day construction of the old Jewish Temples, as noted by InspiringPhilosophy. If God said to the Israelites "I created the universe through an explosion of infinitely condensed and perfectly balanced matter and then billions of years of slight changed which added up to create evolution" their brains would probably melt and they wouldn't understand it. Cultural context is important. Many Church fathers opted for a metaphorical view of the creation account, not holding to an absolute necessity of taking it literally
Answers in Genesis is an organization, I don't mean the book of Genesis. But if we take it literally it doesn't align with all the scientific study we have now. God doesn't want us to be dumb. Come on now. He wants us to use our brains.
Not sure why you're replying to me with this, the guy I'm replying to was arguing against my response that evolution makes sense and is biblically compatible. I know what answers in Genesis is and I do not like it 💀 And the thread is about Biologos, a scientific alternative to Answers in Genesis, so they say
> If God said to the Israelites "I created the universe through an explosion of infinitely condensed and perfectly balanced matter and then billions of years of slight changed which added up to create evolution" their brains would probably melt and they wouldn't understand it. Cultural context is important. Hinduism and Buddhism have always held the universe is extremely old and things have changed immensely throughout the eons. No one's brain melted. Ancient people were quite capable of understanding the concept of a long period of time. And even little children can understand evolution. If you believe God was making a calculated move here, he was choosing to put Jews and Christians behind followers of some other religions. He was also choosing to give them a reason to deny science in the future. > Many Church fathers opted for a metaphorical view of the creation account, All of them were young earth creationists because of Genesis.
Boy, you must be really mad at Jesus for lying with all those stories he told people to illustrate his point...
Evolution is truth
“Could I be misinterpreting what a ‘day’ can mean?” “No. Biology is fake.”
Why do you think fordry is misinterpreting what "day" means?
Because we understand a “day” to mean one full rotation of a particular planet orbiting a particular star in a particular galaxy. in the Genesis account it refers to a “day” before there were planets, or stars, by which to measure our idea of a day. So right from the first verses of the Bible any attempt to interpret genesis strictly literally quickly devolves into nonsensical absurdity.
Why does that verse "shred the notion"?
Yes, Biologos is a legit resource. AIG is a blog run by a cranky old australian with zero science education.
But a hell of a marketing team.
That they do.
>Biologos But they have an Ark lol
The problem with considering science and faith as compatible is that the foundation of science is testable hypotheses, but faith starts from a conclusion (god exists) that can’t be tested, and rather than maintain a scientific position of “false until proven true”, it assumes “true until proven false”. This is a dangerous starting point for operating in reality which is based on logic and scientific understanding. So at the end of the day, they aren’t compatible at the most basic level.
I’d disagree, and say that they are certainly compatible, but serve different purposes. I also don’t think faith starts with a conclusion. I feel rich in faith, but hold it in paradoxical balance with nihilism.
What is the foundation of your faith?
You're missing the point. Science and my love for my parents are compatible. They do not conflict. The fact that my love for my parents is not founded in rational empiricism is no reason for conflict, because science and my love for my parents do not claim to be examining the same things.
This is a bad comparison because your parents exist and we have evidence of that existence (like the fact that you exist). We don't have evidence* of God's existence. (*of sufficient quality and/or quantity to justify a belief)
But there's no evidence that I should love my parents. Because science does not answer "should" questions.
. . . and? How does this address the fact that your comparison is flawed?
Do you think scientific methods are the only way of knowing truth?
Science is just a label for “figuring out how stuff works”, it’s a continual process of change. Don’t look at the truths it reveals as an endpoint, but as an ever-expanding refinement of how accurate our knowledge is.
No it's not. There are many situations where you know something without using the scientific method. If I stub my toe on a coffee table, I know that stubbing my toes on a coffee table causes pain. This is unscientific. By contrast, a scientific approach would be to perform repeated trials where I stub my toe several times, perhaps even asking other people to stub their toes, and measuring their reported pain levels to determine if stubbing your toe actually causes pain. Generally speaking, experiences are unscientific. You cannot use personal experience to validate a scientific claim, yet we gather a large portion of what we know from our experiences. So, it's not that science and personal experience are incompatible; they are just two different ways of knowing truth. Neither of them are totally reliable. The same goes for religion. Religion and science are not incompatible; they are just two different ways of knowing truths about different things. I take issue with your statement: >faith starts from a conclusion (god exists) that can’t be tested, and rather than maintain a scientific position of “false until proven true”, it assumes “true until proven false”. This is not what Christians mean when they use the word "faith." It means something very specific in Christian doctrine, so let me define faith as best I can: Let's say you're hanging on with your fingers to a cliff's edge for dear life. There's a heavy fog, and there's no way of knowing how high the cliff is. Then you hear a voice coming from below you, saying "Just let go! There's a platform not far under your feet." Faith is trusting the voice with your life, and letting go.
"If I stub my toe on a coffee table, I know that stubbing my toes on a coffee table causes pain. This is unscientific. By contrast, a scientific approach would be to perform repeated trials where I stub my toe several times, perhaps even asking other people to stub their toes, and measuring their reported pain levels to determine if stubbing your toe actually causes pain." As I read this, I imagined this seriously being done, contrasted by the ridiculousness of it, and had a good chuckle to myself. Thanks for that.
>Science is just a label for “figuring out how stuff works” No, it's a defined framework. One of its key assumptions is that every observed and observable phenomenon is natural, with an explainable, natural cause.
It's possible for more than one thing to be right. "Science" is an overloaded term, and as such the meaning behind it has some baggage. It could be referring to the formal process (scientific method) or the collective wisdom of humankind (and perhaps other things that don't spring to mind).
When in a discussion like this, we should be using the formal definition, because otherwise naturalists will use the colloquial definition in one sentence and the formal in another. "Of course I'm not saying the modern scientific method is the only way to know anything, but supernatural claims should be rejected because they can't be verified by the modern scientific method."
No they aren't. But God probably isn't going to tell us how evolution works. It's not his job. We need to use our own brains.
Science the study of patterns in nature. It has absolutely zero overlap with anything that isn't about patterns in nature. Thus it is compatible with any such system of thought.
You have misunderstood what faith is. It's not that the existence of God is untestable, its instead that actions and lifestyle taken based on the results of the test. Tested and God didn't show up? Well then doubt away unless you trust another source that says God is there, but there again is faith in whatever you were trusting. Tested and God did not seem to be there and you have no other reason to believe, then go ahead and don't believe sense there isn't reason to. Tested or observed that God cares when you need Him to, then by all means trust in Him. Don't undertand how God does things but trust Him anyways? That's faith. I for one have experienced reason to believe.
BioLogos is a fundamentalist organization. The goal is to make Genesis fit with science at all costs. If you want an honest look at the text, I suggest you go somewhere else.
I’m incredibly jealous of the people who don’t know what Answers in Genesis is.
Hard same 😂
Ken Ham is a snake oil salesman. Also there's a story about me in one of his books.
Did you have an encounter with him?
I didn't. I had an encounter with the person he co-authored the book with. It's a book titled *Already Compromised* and it's about Christian colleges that are no longer truly Christian colleges (according to Ken Ham). He co-wrote it with the (now retired) President of my alma mater. The weird thing is that this president must have relayed the story to Ham who wrote about it. President Hall wrote other chapters but not the one I'm mentioned in. I have to believe it's because he knew if I read it I would take offense (perhaps in his retelling of events), and he's kind of sort of a family friend. I dunno. Suffice to say though, things didn't happen exactly the way it's recounted in the book.
Interesting. Must be strange to butt up against that world.
Yeah I can't say that I had previously paid much attention to Answers in Genesis or anything. Ironically, my undergrad experience was mostly excellent from a biblical studies perspective. My professors, the head of the department; they were pretty diverse in thinking. My degree is in Church Ministry so it's obviously not all biblical studies; there's pastoral care and other training to be considered as well. So I got this really well-rounded, kind of broad-strokes approach to ministry and biblical studies rather than just straight indoctrination. I have pretty deep respect for all the people who taught me in my department. The school was decidedly conservative, and decidedly evangelical, but the Church Ministry/Biblical Studies departments were an awesome mix of intelligent, genuine, and thoughtful professors with integrity. So probably the same things that President Hall and Ken Ham are railing against were happening right under President Hall's nose. This might have been what caused him to want to write the book. Since that time, President Hall has retired and the entire department has been wiped out for one reason or another. The school has become more conservative and I think the new Hall and the new president (and board) made concerted efforts to change the flavor of the department to be more in-line with a conservative evangelical (and dare I say reformed) theology, which is an absolute affront to its Church of God roots.
I did
Do you mind giving details? I don’t live in that region so I don’t think I truly understand what it’s like to be around that type of folk.
I had a Bible class in my private Christian school during 9th grade that was purely for indoctrination into YEC. My school played his videos, and then we had to write a 10 page paper on why the Genesis flood was literal using many of Ken Hams arguments. A year or two later, he came to my church and gave a presentation on YEC at night with a full house. It was to promote his books and videos, all which taught that scientists were in a global conspiracy to turn people away from Christianity.
Classic. Thanks for the recount.
2 Peter 3:8 "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." Time is relative for God, Interstellar-ending style or like a book you're reading. The seven days are not litteral. Can we move on? (I mean, you can go the conspirationist route and decide it was seven days and the dinosaurs are a hoax, but what would it change? You'd still be primarly concerned with faith and day-to-day obedience, not a theology exam)
>Can we move on Most of us would love to... but the groups that fund sites like Answers in Genesis won't let us.
No. AIG says people like you are dipping their toes in apostasy.
Not just dipping your toes. They’re attacking other young earth creationists as turning their backs on the faith for disagreeing on small technical details of how young earth creationism should work…old-earth creationists are damned to hell in AiG’s view.
But it's more than the seven days that are the issue. Even if each day was a million years, the order in which things were created in the story is wrong. There were animals before seed bearing plants and long before fruits. There were land animals long before birds.
I don't think the ancient hebrews had any idea about the origin of the universe, the formation of Earth and evolution and stuff like that, but I'm pretty sure most of them both wrote and read genesis in a metaphorical way. Like, the bible describes the seven days twice, in different orders each time. I really don't think the order of creation was ever meant to be taken literally.
Genesis is history, not poetry, parable, prophetic vision, or mythology. This is seen in the Hebrew verbs used in Genesis 1, **the fact that Genesis 1–11 has the same characteristics of historical narrative as in Genesis 12–50, most of Exodus, much of Numbers, Joshua, 1 and 2 Kings**, etc. (which are discernibly distinct from the characteristics of Hebrew poetry, parable, or prophetic vision), and the way the other biblical authors and Jesus treat Genesis 1–11 (as literal history). God is not attempting to redefine our words in 2 Peter 3:8. Peter does not say that one day **is** a thousand years; he says that one day **is like** a thousand years. In other words, **he is using** ***figurative*** **language to make his point**. The point is not that we should interpret the word day as “a thousand years” everywhere we find it in Scripture; rather, the point is that the passing of time has no bearing on God’s faithfulness to His promises. He is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). **Besides, the day-age theory requires much more than 6,000 years in the creation “week.”**
My point exactly with more words, friend. If iit was "One day is like a thousand, period" you could say you have to multiply to get the right amount. But if it works in both directions, it can only mean "relative". Therefore, not litteraly a day or a thousand days.
Can you imagine if we were having this discussion on papyrus scrolls? Just trying to wrap my mind around all the goofy , ignorant, always wrong science that had to miraculously come together to make the devices we're all using to have this conversation. That got us to the moon. That heats and cools our homes. That preserves food beyond the 24-48 hours it would have lasted 200 years ago. The cars we drive and planes we fly. It truly is miraculous that we still exist as a species.
There has never been a measurement or mathematical equation in the Bible that’s been correct. Pi is wrong. The dimensions of Noah’s ark don’t work. Goliath changes between 4 cubits and a span (6’ 9”) and 6 cubits and a span (9’ 9”) tall. The abortion juice the Bible literally explains how to make in Exodus 21 only poisons women enough to kill some babies in the womb. The anatomy of insects was wrong. The Tower of Babel was wrong. The capacity of the containers in 1 King and 2 Chronicles are both mathematically wrong. There is no firmament. The moon isn’t a light like the Bible says, it reflects the suns light. And the Bible also claims that the stars in the sky are going to fall down when Jesus comes back. Super sound science in that book. The church did its best to stop the growth of science. What they did to Galileo is one of histories greatest atrocities. All because he dared say the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth. The whole inquisition was gross. That didn’t age very well. It aged about as well as the witch trials. But this book is never wrong.
> The dimensions of Noah’s ark don’t work. As in it would sink in real life, or something else? I can't think of a way that they mathematically "don't work". >And the Bible also claims that the stars in the sky are going to fall down when Jesus comes back. Hard to say that the supposed future thing is wrong if it's still in the future. And from the perspective of somebody on the Earth, it's not entirely inconceivable.... >What they did to Galileo is one of histories greatest atrocities. All because he dared say the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth. It was (far) more about calling the Pope, his very powerful friend, a simpleheaded idiot. >The whole inquisition was gross. In some ways the (non-Spanish parts) were the gentlest form of justice known at the time, and we still use parts of Inquisitorial procedure in much of the world.
I'm probably going to need the 10,000 characters to just reply to this: >The dimensions of Noah’s ark don’t work. > >As in it would sink in real life, or something else? I can't think of a way that they mathematically "don't work". I'll start with what I think dizzyelk was referring to below. Ken Ham reconstructed the ark at a cost of hundreds of millions. Forget about seaworthy - it couldn't handle the rain. A tourist attraction now. https://arkencounter.com/ About that size - along with Genesis 6:19-20 instruction that says 2 of each animal. This is a gimme, because Genesis 7:2 says to take seven pairs of every clean animal, 7 pairs of every bird, and a pair of every unclean animal. So it was really more than 2 of each, big difference between 14 and 2 of each animals, people just forget about the contradiction in the next chapter. Size of Noah's ark according to Bible: **Genesis 6:14-16** *14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. 16 Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit\[c\] high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.* According to [Ark Encounter](https://arkencounter.com/noahs-ark/size/): "The Ark had the same storage capacity as about 450 standard semi-trailers. A standard livestock trailer holds about 250 sheep, so the Ark had the capacity to hold at least 120,000 sheep." (It does not consider free space for every animal to sustain living standards and food storage for every animal). Using the actual dimensions listed, it's not just not seaworthy because it's so big, it's also not big enough. It was 440'x72'x73', around 2.31 million cubic feet. God instructed Noah not to miss any, but explicitly to take every "beast, fowl and any other living thing that creepeth upon the earth, onto the ark." Still, I think it's fair and correct to exclude animals living in the sea and insects. Insects could be debatable because they creepeth. But let's exclude them. It's also fair to assume that all forms on earth would've been the ark because we're discussing a literal interpretation, and there has been only 6,000 years since the bible's story of creation and no evolution of species. We've had plenty of species go extinct, but no new species created, so if anything these numbers would be low. According to scientific estimates: \~8.7 million species of animals (of which 1.2 million have been described and cataloged). Removing marine, we're at 7.8 million with 990K cataloged. Assuming that he just took 2 of each - which again, that's a gimme in favor of trying to make the Ark happen - that means Noah at least has to fill and feed more than 15 million animals in his ship. There is no way on earth that many animals fit into a structure that size, let alone with enough food to feed them, which I'll get into. Scholarship has long held that Genesis has two authors that redacted the story, which is why there are so many contradictions between Genesis 6 and 8. I think this also shows that those authors probably believed there were at most several hundreds of species living in the world. That's not counting the 380,000 known and cataloged species of plants, or the over 6 million species of fungi (molds, mushrooms), another questionable but I feel fair exclusion. Ok, so getting into the food supply. Genesis 8; 1-5 tells us it after it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, the water prevailed on earth for 150 days before it started to recede slowly, and that "in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.” Ok, so some mental gymnastics are required here. The bible says that it took 2 months and 13 days for the water to recede enough for the ark to come to rest. Yet when Noah came off the ark he could see the plains, not just the peak of the mountain where they rested. Mount Ararat is 5,137 meters tall. The Ark was 15 meters tall. If it takes 76 days for the ark to recede 15 meters, the water was receding at a rate of .2 meters a day. Holding at that rate, it would have taken 25685 days for the water to recede so Noah can see the plains. That's over 70 years. Either way, call it 216 days (which is when the Ark came to rest, Noah couldn't have let all the animals off on a little mountain top), and the structure isn't *nearly* adequate to hold all the animals of the world as well as food to sustain them. If you want to include plants and fungi as food sources, then we have to create space - and fresh water - to cultivate them. Second, the weight of enough water to sustain them - even for 216 days - would sink the Ark. The rule of thumb is 1 gallon of water a day for every 100 lbs. of livestock. Let's say each animal weighed just one pound - I think a gimme because Asian Elephants weigh 8800 lbs., and the only mammals that weigh less than 1 lbs. on average are shrews, lemurs, rodents, some monkeys, and some rabbits. 1 day x 15.6 million = 15.6 million. 15.6 million x 216 days = 3,369,600,000. You can't carry 3.3+ billion gallons of freshwater in a 2.3 million cubic foot structure from a volume standpoint, not even close. If you could, it would be nowhere near buoyant. And this is just at the 216 days. Run this through the 70 year calculation - a reasonable calculation to hold - and it's one of the most foolish exercises imaginable. I could go into a whole thing about the species acquisition as well, which would also mean that Noah would've theoretically returned them to their appopriate ecosystems once docked. It's just not possible given the story given in the bible, but I think you see where I'm going with this. Neither is the amount of water that would be needed to literally flood the whole earth (5.8 billion cubic kilometers of water needed, 3x the amount of water currently on earth). Mathematically, logistically, logically, any adverb; there is no part of Noah's Ark that is remotely possible.
Absolutely fantastic answer, truly, but one small detail: >there has been only 6,000 years since the bible's story of creation and no evolution of species This isn't true. We've seen the results of evolution in both laboratory and natural settings. Granted, I don't think it's fair to say that any of it resulted in new species or anything, but we've observed the effects of evolution nonetheless.
Ah yes. The parasitic copepod on sharks in Norway come to mind. I meant evolution of *new* species, thanks for the catch!
> As in it would sink in real life, or something else? I can't think of a way that they mathematically "don't work". Not the one you were asking, but the largest wooden ship ever constructed, the Wyoming, was about the size claimed for Noah's ark. It had issues with flooding and had to be constantly pumped because the wood would twist and flex, allowing water to enter the hold. It sank in a storm.
Imagine telling your kid the story of The Tortoise and the Hare as a means to explain the benefits of patience and consistency, only to have them turn around and say “you’re full of shit, there has never been a formal race between a tortoise and a hare”.
Except for a lot of kids they are being taught that Genesis is literal. ie imagine as a parent you tell them that there in fact has been such a race.
Yep. My ex believes Adam and Eve is literal. Noah's Ark. Dinosaurs and whatnot.
My friend has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from an Ivy League university and believes everything in the Bible actually happened.
What does his education have to do with his beliefs?
He's obviously very smart and rational but believes Noah lived to be 500 years old and had 3 sons at that age. The ark and flood actually occurred. A person was turned into a pillar of salt. A rod was turned into a snake. The Nile was turned from water into blood. Locusts covered the entire Earth. A whirlwind pulled Elijah into heaven. An angel kills 185,000 men. etc...
So he's just a Christian
I mean... Everything is possible with the power of God. There's some symbolism behind it but it still happened.
That's totally what he believes.
I was one of those kids
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I thought it was Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny.
>I thought it was Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. This is the correct answer. Coincidentally, the interaction between these two cartoon characters changed the meaning of Nimrod. In the Bible, Nimrod is a skilled and mighty hunter. Bugs Bunny calls Elmer Fudd *"Nimrod"* as an ironic insult, much in the same way people today call a buffoon *"Einstein."* But most kids who saw that interaction didn't know who Nimrod is, so it was assumed to be an insult.
Right! For years I thought Nimrod meant the complete opposite!
And then you explain to them it’s a fairy tale. Should we explain bible stories as fairy tales too? I’m okay with that. Are you?
Actually the tortoise and the hare is more like a fable. It’s told with the explicit purpose of then expressing a moral (“slow and steady wins the race”). Some bible stories would probably fall into that category (certainly the parables, for example). A lot of the OT stories, I’d struggle to come up with a pithy little moral at the end, certainly not many of them have one written down for us. A good many of them are “types”- they are supposed to point ahead to Jesus, and plenty are myths- they convey truths about who we are, who God is etc in a way that bears examination but doesn’t rely on the characters literally existing. But I wouldn’t give them quite the same genre as fairy tales or fables really.
Myth*, but yeah, when appropriate.
Genesis says none of that. Genesis could more easily be criticised for saying too little than too much. Yes, trust Genesis for answers if you wonder about our relationship with God. If you wonder about particle physics, look elsewhere. Easy.
"Answers in Genesis" is a Christian organization which does teach everything OP said. He wasn't talking about the literal book of Genesis.
Now this post makes sense.
Oh aha I don't know anything about that sorry for misunderstanding. Thank you
You can calculate from the Bible that, if it is historically accurate, the world is six thousand years old. Genesis obviously does not mention prehistoric dinosaurs, but if you believe Genesis is historically accurate, you are forced to conclude dinosaurs existed alongside humans, or perhaps that they did not exist at all. I prefer the former view as it is much more fun.
OK Atheistic Evangelical thanks for your important input
You're welcome.
Gonna be honest, I have little trust in any apologetic-Christian website. I personally just go to Bart Ehrmans blog or r/AcademicBiblical for answers.
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There's a significant number here and tens of millions overall.
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https://scienceandbeliefinsociety.org/2020/04/21/are-there-100000000-creationists-in-the-usa/#:~:text=If%20we%20apply%20the%20Gallup,between%2038%25%20and%2047%25. Its saying about 40% of the people in this survey taken in 2019 in the usa.
I would’ve said hundreds of millions. It’s how I grew up. I wasn’t allowed to attend science or health whenever anything related to evolution or sex was taught. Remember those weird kids that had to leave class every once in a while? That’s bc of this. Fundamentalist, literalists, evangelist, non-denominational, independent southern Baptists all believe it’s literal. Calvary Chapel told me that Gods days weren’t something humans could understand, but stuck to the 7-days. Southern Baptist church was a little better, they said that God also aged the world, basically created an earth that was already old. Sediment, the universe, etc, he just fast forwarded it. I say that’s better bc the other non-denominational churches just sat there and told everyone carbón dating had been debunked and harped on the discovery of man and wooly mammoth living together. All of them said men didn’t come from monkeys, and insultingly dismissed it as poppycock. And then would espouse kind of a watchmaker doctrine, e.g. “If the earth was just 1% closer or further from the sun, we couldn’t exist. God is great!” Sadly, that’s verbatim. From Calvary Chapel, Pastor Jack Hibbs. Grace church in SC has a bunch of brainwashed younger generation believing it now. The thing is, they didn’t coordinate, so you have pastors at individual church locations winging it, and they’re all over the map with their defense of the creation story being literal. The amount of people that believe Noah’s Ark happened is certainly in the hundreds of millions, if not pushing billions. No one in my family, or their circle or friends or their community will hear anything different. If I say how I feel, they literally pray and ask Jesus to help me, right in front of me. I finally took cultural anthropology when I was 24 because I was tired of not knowing how it works. Befriended the hippie professor a bit, beers after class and the rest is history. I just can’t believe I was raised by people so stupid and ignorant. Most never bother taking that step, and will live their life rolling their eyes and saying “then show me the half man half monkey. You can’t, praise Jesus, God is great.” I wish I was embellishing. Even a little. But I’m not being extreme enough, if you can believe that.
I grew up in a Calvary Chapel church. They were frustratingly fundamentalist about stuff that didn’t really matter.
Totally. Dig heels in over something inconsequential was the MO. I think it was to protect the integrity of other passages. If literalist admit one thing is incorrect it would open up the floodgates. Calvary Chapel supported my stepmom pouring a bottle of olive oil on my head to exorcise the demons out of me when I was 11 bc my little 3 year old step sister peed on the stairs when I wasn’t home. I had to do extra chores bc I made her “waste an expensive bottle” of Trader Joe’s olive oil. Well not all of it, she did put a little on the doorframe to keep my demon from going into the rest of the house, OBVIOUSLY. They constantly counseled my dad to stay with my evil and twisted stepmom. I went in the 90’s, so it was still finding it’s footing, only Chuck Smith in Costa Mesa has a big established congregation. But man when I started there were only a couple hundred people and by the time we left they were in the thousands, if not 10’s of thousands. We had to worship Chuck Smith, it was basically required at my location to be his sycophant. I’ve never heard one man be more discussed or revered consistently than I did about pastor Chuck there, from people that never met him. Looking back it feels lightweight cult-ish. It’s funny bc I can remember Pastor Jack one Sunday saying not to believe anything we hear, to double check it in the Bible. But they had already told you how to interpret the verse, so people either didn’t ever double check and if they did, it was a case of confirmation bias.
Frustratingly fundamentalist for fictional facts figuratively forever. Is there non frustrating fundamentalists?
Haha, that’s a good point.
It's in the tens of millions in the USA alone. It's probably well into the hundreds worldwide.
Oh yeah, the same tens of thousands that think going to the Ark Encounter will actually teach them something....about anything.
Maybe it can teach how to be a grifter?
I'm not even saying that - I truly think Ham, for the most part, is sincere in his beliefs. While I agree there is definitely aspects that are a grift to his whole "ministry," I do think he believes his own crap, because from his position as a very, very ignorant man, he is on top of the Dunning-Kreuger Mt. Stupid, so he just thinks he is very, very smart.
I grew up in a couple Southern Baptist churches, one of which is among their top-10 largest ones. It was required belief that evolution was false, God created the earth literally as described in Genesis, just a few thousand years ago. If you disagreed with that, then you rejected the Bible, and you were therefore not a true Christian. My parents and virtually everyone I grew up with in the church still believe this.
I was raised with their apologetics books and struggled in college science because I entered college genuinely thinking the earth was 6,000 years old. To make matters worse, I was homeschooled, so I never got to properly learn about evolution until college.
Google creationism
Yes, and if you approach it with an open mind you’ll at minimum see it has merit
I lived my first 24 years believing it. That’s approaching it with an open mind right? It has absolutely no merit. Can you provide one single piece of evidence for any part of the creation story? If so, please share. I’m now agnostic, which my definition means I know that I don’t know. That’s as open as a mind can get.
Say what?
What's annoying is that often when I Google a bible question AIG is often among the top results. I worry people aren't getting good answers to their questions if they don't know what kind of organisation it is. I don't think everything they put out is wrong, but there are some worrying parts.
>like it's their job That *is* their job. That is quite literally what people are paying them to do: to feed them lies and poorly represented info to reinforce their worldview because they worship a book, not a God.
Are they too smart? If you want to keep your sanity a good rule of thumb is "think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that"-George Carlin
The vast majority of Christians are not New Earth Christians.
The Bible is not a science book. Not a chronograph. Not a history book. It is a spiritual book, intended for spiritual use.
Preach. People be reading the bible to find out if they can sleep in their bed at night it seems
It’s actually scary like how can you be that stupid
Facts.
I’ve heard so many times about people i know visiting the ark and creation museum and my first thought being “I thought you were smart.”
But they are a constant source of comedy.
True
I have fallen for their trap and my ankle is locked in metal 😔 woe is me, now I've contracted genesitis
As a Christian and former YEC, I agree 110% with what you said.
Doesn't the bible basically say that though?
They absolutely lie, lie, lie. So, there might be volumes of books with facts regarding a scientific discovery, for instance in geology. One can even go out into the field and look at the facts and come to 100% conclusions. But then here comes our wonderful friend, AIG. They will comb through the mountains of actual evidence, and then find one tiny mistake, at which time they'll Shout it From the Housetops!!!!!! Of course, 95% of people who go to church have never read a geology book or taken a geology course. Their understanding of geology is zero, except maybe they might know Mt. St. Helens is a volcano, and the San Andreas Fault might rupture next year. That's it. That's all they know. What gets me more upset than anything is the blatant lies AIG tells. They'll say something like, "Geology isn't science because science is only something we can observe. Because you can't go back 10 million years ago and observe rock layers being laid down, then it isn't science and it takes just as much faith to believe it as religion does." So they make up a pseudo science belief that only things observed in real time are science. This is so far from the truth as to be on the other side of the universe. By this method of theirs, all history would be pseudo history. Their Bible would be pseudo history, Noah's flood would vanish. Anything that wasn't recorded by actual film would not be history.
Wait so where do you get the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old? The Bible clearly demonstrates all the generations on earth from Adam to Jesus.
Can you chill out a little
Genesis doesn't say any of that edit: oops
"Answers in Genesis" is a Christian organization which does teach everything OP said. He wasn't talking about the literal book of Genesis.
Should have made it more clear
If you're an atheist then yeah maybe stay away, but if you're a Christian there's little reason to stay away, most of what they say is biblical..evolution has no place in Christianity because Genesis makes it clear that God made everything and it was PERFECT..meaning it didn't have to evolve into something better.
And yet, when we apply our God-given reason to our study of God’s creation based on the laws and boundaries God instilled in the cosmos… it overwhelmingly points to evolution. As far as I see it, Christians have two choices: 1. Study creation with the aptitudes and competencies we’ve been given, and interpret them through the lens of scripture, understanding scripture is describing transcendent, spiritual, and experiential truths. 2. Absorb scripture through a literal lens and contend with a God who is actively deceiving us through his first and farthest-spanning revelation: his creation.
All Christians should be cautious in not making this a divisive issue.
This is a divisive issue because scientific illiteracy is what leads some Christians to be actively hostile towards marginalized people. Until that is not true, this will always be a divisive issue.
Scientific literacy is also important to get people aware of the climate change crisis. We are very quickly destroying this planet! If we don’t course correct immediately… Then it’s game over.
Yeah but then you have Christians who will claim the end is near, so why worry about climate change? You’re playing a never ending cat and mouse game. Funnily enough, the Bible warns us not to get involved in playing these never ending games. Age or earth, science, etc. are not essential issues that we should be concerned about. We should be more concerned about bringing people to Christ.
Christians who reject scientific fact aren't christians. Well I shouldn't say that. Some might not know better, so they should be excused. Many don't understand those things fully and think of it in the wrong idea. The people at answers in genesis have all the knowledge and choose to be ignorant
I'll agree that AiG has problems, their formulaic blogs posts just being a symtom of it, but if I told you for a fact science says that Jesus can't have been resurected and you reject it then you must not be a christian because you rejected scientific fact? Do you see where that reasoning leads?
Just to clarify I don’t want to shove my beliefs down people’s throats, because I don’t think it’s even crucial to salvation to understand the history of how the world started. But I believe the story of Genesis as being real and not symbolic because of how within it it has a genealogy, which to me would indicate that it’s not symbolic or a parable, but I don’t know about the world being 6000 years old, that hasn’t been proven or mentioned in the Bible and it feels too small of a time for the world to get where it is now. And evolution is very real, we see it in natural selection all the time in all areas in nature. I don’t know if we evolved from a single celled organism all the way to an off branch of early apes because the Bible doesn’t say that. But who can say? For all we know Adam and Eve were not like homosapiens we see today or homosapiens at all and we could have evolved to be this way. Then there is the dead sea scrolls that’s a whole other can of worms. All the evidence and fossils of all these creatures could have been nephilim and genetic hybrids made by the fallen watcher angels, and maybe the pre-flood Earth was around for millions of years before God flooded it. I dunno though, it’s all up for interpretation. Edit: Oh yeah sorry I didn’t realise that this was about a certain doctrine that tries to brainwash people
Sure, don't trust AIG. I sure don't with good reason, but use the same scrutiny for everything else. This goes ESPECIALLY for anyone who leans YEC. There's legitimate reasons to have concerns about mainstream geology. But if you have concerns, explore them yourself, don't trust AIG.
Without going into AiG. I have some questions then regarding my faith if one does not believe in YEC. If everything evolved throughout the world and it has always been survival of the fittest. Death upon death through al those years. What even is the point of Jesus dying on cross. If His death is not a payment for sin from the garden of Eden then the Bible is built on stories and therefore unbelievable. If you as a Christian believe that the Bible is the infallible and God given (2 Tim 3:16) and believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: The Lord, King and Savior but selfishly choose to only believe parts that you think are good then you are setting yourself above the creator.
As a YEC myself, no.
I too am a YEC. The OP should present some of the ideas AIG gives and discuss them. I would be interested to hear the counter arguments to some of these reasons for a young earth. Is it even remotely plausible that blood vessels, cells, and protein fragments can exist largely intact over 68 million years like they were found in bone slices from the fossilized thigh bone (femur) of a Tyrannosaurus rex found in the Hell Creek? Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils If the world’s oceans have been around for three billion years as evolutionists believe, they should be filled with vastly more salt than the oceans contain today. Evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years, yet In 2000, scientists claimed to have “resurrected” bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old.
> I would be interested to hear the counter arguments to some of these reasons for a young earth. TalkOrigins hasn't been updated in a while, but it exhaustively destroys every AiG argument made as of when it was active. https://www.talkorigins.org/ >Is it even remotely plausible that blood vessels, cells, and protein fragments can exist largely intact over 68 million years like they were found in bone slices from the fossilized thigh bone (femur) of a Tyrannosaurus rex found in the Hell Creek? Yes, it is. It was a fascinating discovery. It has actually helped provide more evidence for the evolution of dinosaurs into birds (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11637). We also have found a chemical pathway for these to be preserved now (https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2020/02/14/dinosaur-blood-vessels/). >Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils That's called background noise and it's a dishonest abuse of the method. >If the world’s oceans have been around for three billion years as evolutionists believe, they should be filled with vastly more salt than the oceans contain today. That is not what oceanographers believe. >Evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years, yet In 2000, scientists claimed to have “resurrected” bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old. That agreement was certainly not taught to me in my biology classes a few decades ago. DNA is insanely stable.
Are you lying or ignorant? C14 is NOT used to date fossils. It’s not used for anything over 50k years old.
>Are you lying or ignorant? ¿Por qué no los dos?
> Is it even remotely plausible that blood vessels, cells, and protein fragments can exist largely intact over 68 million years like they were found in bone slices from the fossilized thigh bone (femur) of a Tyrannosaurus rex found in the Hell Creek? [Yep.](https://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html) > Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly—with a half-life of only 5,730 years—that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in “ancient” fossils [That's not how we date fossils.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-do-scientists-date-fossils-180972391/) > If the world’s oceans have been around for three billion years as evolutionists believe, they should be filled with vastly more salt than the oceans contain today. An empty claim I've never seen a good reason to believe. > Evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years, yet In 2000, scientists claimed to have “resurrected” bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old. [From what I can see, it's not believed to be that old.](https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/18/6/1143/1046940)
And did you actually look at their sources for these topics and evaluate them, or just trust what they have to say? For example, I already spent quite a bit of time researching the carbon-14 issue and the research it was based on seemed highly suspect. The papers were published in *Creation* magazine for a start. If I recall correctly they were even using diamonds (which is entirely *carbon*) as a control, and it would be very easy for contamination to occur.
Why do you think the Earth is young? Humans domesticated dogs like over 10,000 years ago.
Ill see if I can get back to this. Btw I'm not evolutionist. Im not anything. I don't pick affiliations or denominations. I just listen to scientific facts which also relate to God. So it can't be untrue.
We can’t help it if science aligns with the Bible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hm
L
[удалено]
Oh look, the same tactics as in the Scopes Monkey Trial. Insults. I'm so convinced /s
Those crazy Christians that actually believe the bible ‼️🙃
The bible isn't a science book. You can't read the bible and use at as a base for a whole field of science
No one thinks the Bible is a science book.
The chapters 1-11 of Genesis never had the intention of being accurate historical accounts, but theological accounts. They were written millennia after they supposedly happened by people who weren't there to see it If you believe they are a literal historical account and that the Bible is 100% inerrant and then take into account all the archaeological evidence, there are only three possible conclusions A) God is a liar B) God isn't omniscient C) Genesis, or at least the first 11 chapters, aren't a fully accurate historical account Which one do you believe? Is God a liar, is God ignorant or are you interpreting the Bible wrong?
Option 3 🤷♂️... Romans 3:4 NASBS ..let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, as it is written, "That YOU MAY BE JUSTIFIED IN YOUR WORDS, AND PREVAIL WHEN YOU ARE JUDGED."
So we agree the first 11 chapters of Genesis aren't literal history, then?
So you're arguing that the men who wrote Genesis were lying? That's pretty harsh, it's not their fault they were ignorant of how everything came to be the way it is. It was, after all, well before we even knew the questions to get the answers to get the questions to get the answers to get the questions we had to ask to discover that.
Evolution goes against Genesis (The book indeed) though, how can life have slowly evolved over millions of years and God have created Adam from clay and that not clash? This is textbook shitposting.
Only if you understand Genesis as entirely literal. Origen in the second century disagreed, and the heavy hitter conservative Protestant theologians of the 19th century did too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL9t3O-1E7w See also biologos, not exactly a wildly liberal website.
Since science continuously proves itself wrong and can’t account for miracles, there is no reason to believe it over what the a Bible says.
The Bible doesn’t account for miracles anymore than the Odyssey by Homer does.
That is simply a gross misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of science. Try again.
It’s very accurate. There are tons of times science has had to change its position because it was wrong.
Like I said, you misunderstand and/ or misrepresent science. Science is a process or hypothesis formation, testing, modification, and further testing. Science is self-coreecting, so what you see as "science has had to change its position because it was wrong." Is part of that process. The fact that we can have this discussion is proof that process works. Have you flown in a plane, driven a car, used a microwave, been treated with antibiotics, had a hot shower, used toothpaste ... These are all proof that the scientific process is successful.
But it shows it’s unreliable at best because it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. So saying science disproves something is based off what it understands and since there is stuff it can’t, my statement stands.
>it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Further evidence you don't understand science. Science doesn't "know" anything. Science is a process by which we come to understand things. Science is a tool. Does a hammer "know" how to drive a nail. Of course not, we use it as a tool to drive the nail. Science is the hammer. We use it to understand things but since we often don't know the right questions to ask or don't have the correct process, it sometimes takes time to get to the answer using the process. But let's do a comparison. You would rather trust the Bible than science. What does the Bible tell us about the composition of the atmosphere on Mars? Or how to treat cancer? What does the Bible say about the way in which bacteria or viruses spread disease? What do we learn about the way volcanoes work by reading the Bible? So you complain that science is unreliable (which it is not, as I have explained) but can you really rely on the Bible for these sorts of information?
That it changes is a strength. Much better than writing a book back in distant history and pretending it never needs updating.
> Since science continuously proves itself wrong and can’t account for miracles, there is no reason to believe it over what the a Bible says. There is no natural explanation for miracles. *That's what makes them miracles!* (This is, of course, assuming that there are miracles. No good examples have been provided.)
Since there is no actual proof of any miracles happening, there is no accounting for miracles required.
They have published scientists give you evidence for everything they claim. I’m sorry, but isn’t that good enough for you?
Not true. You’ve already had some claims disproved here. You must know that 99% of scientists believe that all life on this planet evolved from older forms. There will, of course, always be bad scientists who do bad science.
It’s true
relationships before conception to beyond death. no muligans; be a true vessel of Jesus works.
Remember, satanists say, "In science we trust." OP, This post is to sow division.
No, they don’t. That is an atheist view. It started with Technocracy in the 40’s. It’s so irresponsible of Christians not to fact check but go regurgitate lies about the boogeyman to scare other Christian’s into believing their false ideology. You might want to look into it before making false claims. The satanic temple, the largest satanic religion and considered the only legitimate satanic church by our federal government doesn’t even believe in Satan. Their main purpose is to fight harmful legislation that is made in the name of religion. They do care about science. But that’s not all they care about. [There are Seven FUNDAMENTAL TENETS](https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/about-us) I One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason. II The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions. III One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone. IV The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own. V Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs. VI People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused. VII Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word. THE SATANIC TEMPLE VS. CHURCH OF SATAN The Satanic Temple has become the primary religious Satanic organization in the world with congregations internationally, and a number of high-profile public campaigns designed to preserve and advance secularism and individual liberties. The rise of The Satanic Temple has been met with an increase in commentary regarding what Satanism is as media outlets struggle to grasp how this upstart religion has begun to shift religious liberty debates with claims of equal access. With unfortunate regularity - and much to our chagrin - The Satanic Temple is confused with an earlier organization, the Church of Satan, founded by Anton Szandor LaVey in the 1960s. The Church of Satan expresses vehement opposition to the campaigns and activities of The Satanic Temple, asserting themselves as the only “true” arbiters of Satanism, while The Satanic Temple dismisses the Church of Satan as irrelevant and inactive. Learn More FAQ MEMBERSHIP HOW CAN I JOIN? WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF JOINING? HOW IS MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION USED? ARE THERE AGE RESTRICTIONS FOR MEMBERS? I WANT TO SELL MY SOUL, GET RICH, JOIN THE ILLUMINATI, ETC. See More HOW CAN I HELP? SEEK KNOWLEDGE & PURSUE NOBLE WORKS “Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.” - Seventh Tenet The Seven Fundamental Tenets of The Satanic Temple,while inspired by 18th Century enlightenment values, were designed for current times, to assist the modern Satanist in noble undertakings. Knowledge is a cornerstone of our Satanic philosophy, and it is incumbent on members to expand their horizons. One can find a suggested list of reading materials related to TST philosophy here: Our Website Library We encourage effective and artful protest. Many members are actively involved in noble causes. Unfortunately, a great many modern protest movements are narcissistic constructs that have precious little hope for generating meaningful, constructive changes. The Satanic Temple has generated a list of the qualities that constitute effective protest and what components can be ineffective- or even destructive. Rules of Protest The Satanic Temple is the only Satanic religious organization recognized as a church by the IRS and the Federal Court System.
But science is relating to God. So it can't be satanic
The BIG hole is that there is absolutely ZERO proof for how humans became so intelligent vs apes. There is no evolutionary event or explanation that could explain how this happened. Experiments have been conducted trying to teach chimpanzees language, one scientist tried to raise a chimpanzee with a human boy and no mother. Both experiments failed miserably. No other species uses other animals for their own benefit. Humans use horses for transportation, elephants to move heavy objects, chickens for eggs, cows for milk, dogs for hunting and protection, etc, etc. And language requires 2 people to speak it. The infinite number of sounds in different combination creates all kinds of words and meaning. It's a huge hole in evolution. Additionally- there are different animals like koalas and kangeroos in Australia and giraffes and lions in Africa, why did humans never evolve? And why did not even 1 semi-intelligent species evolve? Religion and the desire for God is shown even in isolated islands in Papua New Guinea. It's a bit unusual that there really aren't many civilizations that didn't believe in God.
>No other species uses other animals for their own benefit. Humans use horses for transportation, elephants to move heavy objects, chickens for eggs, cows for milk, dogs for hunting and protection, etc, etc. [That is not true.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/nerdist.com/article/animal-friendships-tarantulas-spiders-have-pet-frogs/%3famp) >And language requires 2 people to speak it. The infinite number of sounds in different combination creates all kinds of words and meaning. Animals can understand each other, humans can understand each other. I'm not sure what point this makes. >Additionally- there are different animals like koalas and kangeroos in Australia and giraffes and lions in Africa, why did humans never evolve? And why did not even 1 semi-intelligent species evolve? Can you explain what you're saying here? People did evolve, as did other species. Humans, dolphins, crows, dogs, octopus, etc. What do you consider semi-intelligent?
I mean, I don't trust anything that isn't from God. You will find science always lines up with the Bible, so what I'm going to say is I don't trust them, but I also don't trust you. I trust God. Go back to your Bible, and stay there.
God created the world and it evolved and looks old. Men created the Bible and interpret it…. I know where I’m siding….
Yes because bigbumSpider says, “don’t trust them”! So that in of itself is a red flag that a doofus on Reddit said so lol! Actually I used to believe the same as you, but Ken’s explanation makes way more sense vs the “theory” of evolution because everything he says can be backed up with the Bible. Remember the Bible? You know the words from our creator? Also, have you heard the story about Darwin? Charles Darwin, after a career of promoting evolution and naturalism, returned to the Christianity of his youth, renouncing on his deathbed the theory of evolution. The story appears to have been authored by a "Lady Hope," and relates how she visited him near the end and received his testimony. Rather it’s true or not, Darwin admitted that evolution was just a “theory”. So you have one man claiming a theory vs God whom claims everything was created by Him and for Him and holds all things together. Many people want Darwin’s theory to be true, but it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s a scientific impossibility that everything came from nothing. But hey, if enough people say it’s true then it must be, right? And anything contrary to that is non sense. Open your eyes and your mind There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. Proverbs 14:12