Should Christians be concerned with the environment? How old is the earth and when did the dinosaurs live? Has the Bible been corrupted? Did God create the earth before the sun and moon? Audio Listen to audio clips originally recorded during outreach events, podcasts, and previous monthly partner messages.
One of my favorite things to do when I am on vacation is hike in the mountains and take in as much scenery and November 1, King David declares in Psalm , "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have October 25, We've all seen a tree growing out of a rock see figure and perhaps wondered how it got water. Scientists have discovered that such October 18, Francis Collins, National Institutes of Health NIH director for the past 12 years, announced that he will step down from his position at the October 11, Is the Gulf Stream losing stability?
If so, does it mean an ice age is coming? In a recent issue of Nature Climate Change, mathematician October 4, During a ministry trip to Hong Kong several years ago I witnessed an example of smartphone addiction. Four young women were walking together down September 27, A fossil discovery of an extinct rat species may provide evidence for early human migration routes and for the location of the Garden of In it, he argues that belief in creation with an appearance of age is a necessary part of Christian theology for various reasons, including the miracles of Jesus.
With the miracle of feeding the multitudes it should take time to grow the grain for the bread and for the fish to mature and be caught. When Jesus turned water into wine, there is an assumed time needed for the grapes to mature, be harvested, and reach fermentation. When Jesus cured blindness or healed Lazarus, the people being healed were given the appearance that they had lived lives free of their ailments, when in fact they had not. Whitcomb cites these stories in the New Testament as examples in addition to the creation story in Genesis of an apparent but counterfactual history in the Bible.
Whitcomb takes issue with Gosse, however, because he believes that God did not create an appearance of age where it was not absolutely necessary, such as with Adam's navel Whitcomb Creationist Kurt P. Wise echoes Whitcomb's sentiments about Christ's miracles being further evidence of appearance of age in his book Faith, Form and Time. Wise furthermore argues that "if God's purpose in creating something is fulfilled by creating it with an appearance of age. Despite the fact that the appearance of age is strictly a philosophical and theological argument, the RATE team which has generally been focused on attempting to use scientific methodologies to back up the young earth model has also weighed in on the issue.
For example, in reference to certain rocks containing Polonium halos that appear to have a long geological history, the RATE team concludeed that according to Genesis it is theologically possible for these rocks to have been created with an appearance of age Snelling The appearance of age is certainly not without its controversy or opponents. Perhaps the most common objection to the appearance of age is the argument that it makes God a deceiver.
Ross believes that God does not deceive mankind and that creating with an appearance of age would violate God's fundamental nature Ross In other words, Ross asks proponents of appearance of age why God would do something that would lead humans to believe something that is false. Both Wise and Whitcomb address the issue of deception. They both make it clear that God is capable of creating the earth with the appearance of age, and if He wanted to do so, He would.
Wise states that God is not a deceiver and that creating the earth with the appearance of age is not deception because if it was, then all of the miracles of Christ described above would also have been deceptions. Additionally, Wise claims, God gives humankind the truth about creation in the Bible, and it is up to them to have faith in His word. Wise concedes, however, that God "provides sufficient ambiguity in the creation for humans to conclude erroneously a history that never actually occurred.
Whitcomb responds to claims of appearance of age being deceptive as being "an affirmation of atheism. If God actually created anything at all, even the simplest atoms, those atoms or other creations would necessarily have an appearance of some age. There could be no genuine creation of any kind, without an initial appearance of age inherent in it Whitcomb and Morris And so, according to proponents of this theory, not only is it not deceptive for God to create with an appearance of age, but it is absolutely necessary for Him to do so.
One important aspect of the appearance of age theory, perhaps the reason for its popularity, is that it is impossible to disprove. Under this model an old earth and a young earth are indistinguishable. Appearance of age is a purely theological claim, so scientists have no way to test it or evaluate it. A problem, however, is that this theory does not actually explain much about creation, and if true, it makes attempts to learn more about the world around us futile.
Geologists can say whatever they wish about the age of the earth. The Scofield Reference Bible , originally published by Oxford University Press in , taught the gap theory to generations of conservative Protestants in the English speaking world.
A full discussion would take us far afield, but something should be said about how gap theorists interpret Genesis , the crucial verse for their model. In some versions of the gap view, the original creation included pre-Adamite people—that is, humans who were not descended from Adam and Eve.
This idea that took many forms, some with racist overtones. Perhaps this strikes you as a bit surprising, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a commonplace conception among Protestants, and not unknown to Catholics either.
Historian David Livingstone has written the definitive history of this fascinating idea. For more, see this interview , but there is no substitute for reading the book itself! Let me make an invitation: who wants to borrow a copy and provide their own commentary here? In all versions of the gap theory, however, fossils are vestiges of the pre-Adamic world, produced when it was destroyed; they are not a record of evolutionary history. All modern animals and many plants were created recently, in six literal days.
Numerous varieties of the day-age view have been proposed since the eighteenth century, too many to review here.
They all teach that the major kinds of plants and animals were created separately, over the eons of earth history; the fossil record shows reliably which came earlier and which came later. Ross thinks God performed millions of acts of special creation, but concordists differ substantially among themselves on the magnitude of the number for this.
Concordists mostly agree, however, that the first true humans were Adam and Eve, and that they were created ex nihilo —but, how recently were they created?
Can the biblical 6, years be stretched far enough to encompass fossils of modern humans homo sapiens sapiens dating back perhaps to nearly , years? The last of the four basic assumptions shared by concordists is that they reject Flood Geology and accept the standard geologic column. Hugh Ross and some others believe that the flood was geographically localized , covering part of the ancient Near East but not the whole globe.
Biblical scholar Paul Seely briefly assesses this view in light of current knowledge here, but a full discussion of the issues goes well beyond of the scope of this online course. Anyone with appropriate expertise is invited to place comments below. Unlike the YECs, OECs do not contest the enormous body of evidence showing that the earth and the universe are billions of years old, and that complex, macroscopic life forms have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years.
Quite the opposite. OEC authors often review selected pieces of the evidence, supplemented by arguments about how to read Genesis in light of that evidence, hoping to persuade YEC readers that mainstream scientific conclusions are indeed very well founded and do not contradict the Bible. Indeed, concordists usually seem to be writing with one eye on YEC readers. Hugh Ross , an outspoken advocate of the day-age view whose views have already been discussed, is probably the most obvious example of such an author today, although many other examples could be given.
Thirty-five years ago, when Scientific Creationism was still relatively new, an influential group of evangelical authors very actively pushed progressive creationist interpretations with both eyes on YEC readers. Perhaps its most useful feature is the detailed account of scientific evidence unrelated to the radioactive processes that are so often criticized by YEC authors, undermining their credibility for many conservative Christian readers.
A revised edition is available here. I recommend that interested parties examine these sources and place comments below. Newman and a scientifically-trained pastor, Herman J. Eckelmann, Jr. The revised edition of this book is also available on the internet. That should not be surprising. Indeed, to some extent the OEC view has been subsumed within ID, though covertly rather than overtly. I will say more about this in my upcoming columns about ID.
Simultaneously with the books by Wonderley and Newman, geologist Davis A. However, his scholarship is impeccable and everything he writes is well worth reading, whether or not it advances a concordist model. Rabbitt History of Geology Award in Reed responds to Young and several other conservative Reformed geologists who accept an old earth here. Incidentally, I met all three of these men Wonderley, Newman, and Young not too long after their books came out.
We were all involved with the American Scientific Affiliation. Readers who are very serious about Christianity and science should join that excellent organization: there simply is no substitute for the kind of live human interaction they foster. No blog or list-serve can come close to matching it.
OECs not only accept the geological evidence for antiquity, they also accept its implications for interpreting Genesis—including its implications for theodicy. OECs today still talk about death before the fall, partly because the absence of animal suffering prior to the fall is absolutely crucial to the YEC view of God and the Bible. OECs hold similar views about God and the Bible, alongside different views about natural history, so pardon the pun they take great pains to explain pain in a manner consistent with their OEC stance.
A nice contemporary example is physicist David Snoke, who is also a licensed preacher in a very conservative denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America.
A recent concordist book about theodicy by William Dembski has drawn substantial attention—partly because the author is a leading advocate of ID, and partly because when he wrote it he was teaching at a seminary owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination in which the YEC view has many influential advocates especially R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Entitled The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World , Dembski states that this particular book, unlike his others, is not about ID, even though the problem of evil is highly relevant to the nature of an intelligent designer.
Hugh Ross apparently thinks that millions of creatures were created separately. Of course, the crucial issue is human origins: whatever a given OEC thinks about how many other creatures were separately created, God created Adam and Eve ex nihilo!
0コメント