Rejecting Six Literal Days - What's the Real Motivation?

[GregH]

Two questions I have for the YEC defenders here and please understand I am not trying to be unkind, just trying to understand.

1) Is there ANY point at which there would be such irrefutable proof from science and/or observation that you might rethink your position? Or is this the kind of thing where you would deny a statement like 2+2=4 if it contradicted a literal 6-day creation?

2) The idea of a literal day without a sun still perplexes me. Andy says that because you have light and a rotating earth, you can have literal days. I disagree. You have to have a fixed light body projecting light onto just part of that rotating earth to make days and nights. In other words, you have to have a sun. Did God make a temporary sun? Did he act as the sun himself?

I agree with those who say that most of the objections to (what to me is) the plain teaching of six 24-hr days is driven by scientific pressures.

This is no different than attempting to explain away much of the rest of the supernatural in Scripture. To give you another example, S. M. Smith, in his article on Kenotic Theology in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, points out that Kenotic Theology arose in part due to modernistic assumptions and the rise of psychology. Jesus “couldn’t” have been both God and man because human understanding says that is impossible.

The age was learning to think in terms of the categories of psychology. Consciousness was a central category. If at our “center” is our consciousness, and if Jesus was both omniscient God and limited man, then he had two centers and was thus fundamentally not one of us. Christology was becoming inconceivable for some. (p. 651)

In other words, modern science (or in this case, social science) made people alter their theology because science says it is impossible for someone to be both God and man. The question, of course, is What does Scripture teach?

you are agreeing with me that the end result of YEC is to reject the scientific process for astronomy (as an example)? After all, if science doesn’t allow me to determine the age of the universe, why believe it lets me know that the Sun’s energy comes from fusion, or to measure distances to the stars, etc

[Mark_Smith]

I have provided the framework over and over again on the creation threads over the last few months. See the book by Hartlett that I referenced. I don’t think it is THE answer, but something like it.

If relativity (or something like it) isn’t the answer, then I go with “there is no way to do science in the cosmos” answer rather than the buffet version you seem to support (pick and choose what you like).

Have a great day dgszweda!

I just don’t understand at the end of the day, how we are any different. Maybe we are just speaking past each other. It appears that 1) we both hold to YEC and 2) we don’t have a clear answer as to how to resolve the differences in YEC and what we see.

The only difference is you feel that I am throwing out science and introducing miracles to resolve, and you feel this throws out all of science and that we still need a full naturalistic answer, of which neither of us can provide. What Hartlett writes is interesting, but it is more theoretical than science. He proposes a fifth space-time dimension, which is not proven either. I am fine with a scientific answer for an answer to resolve YEC. Their just isn’t one at this time, even the proposed answers are just guesses at best. So instead of me guessing and throwing out scientific possibilities, I just indicate we don’t know. My rationale for not throwing out scientific resolutions as a proposal, is because almost all of the science proposals that creationists throw out, are eventually themselves thrown out, and in a lot of cases are even rejected by creationists. So why throw anything out. I could say that matter went faster than the speed of light. It is theoretically possible, just not within the framework of quantum mechanics.

[Mark_Smith]

you are agreeing with me that the end result of YEC is to reject the scientific process for astronomy (as an example)? After all, if science doesn’t allow me to determine the age of the universe, why believe it lets me know that the Sun’s energy comes from fusion, or to measure distances to the stars, etc

Why do you believe astronomers can measure the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy to be 2.5 million light years away, but you obviously don’t agree that the light from the Andromeda Galaxy traveled 2.5 million years to get here?

You reject the time because of Genesis 1. Why keep the distance when it is measured with the same assumptions that led to the age?

Mark, I guess I thought this question has been repeatedly answered, although I understand not to your satisfaction. I don’t have any problem with God creating light already on its way to earth when He created the universe, any more than I have a problem with there being light before a sun, or any more than I have a problem with Him creating a full grown man who looked like he had lived for years. I do not see any qualitative difference, only a quantitative one, between a man with the appearance of years of age and distant stars with the appearance of millions of years of age.

I can’t answer for Greg or David, but given that in the absence of something miraculous being demonstrated to us (like the “sun standing still” or the sundial moving backwards), most of us accept uniformitarianism, while understanding that God can alter or go around natural laws when he so desires. I believe that it’s possible God created the light from distant stars already in place, or he could have used some relativistic process to get the light here faster, or perhaps even more likely, something completely unrelated to either of those.

So since I don’t believe that miracles of the scope of creation or the other miracles I mentioned are currently being used by God at this point in time (at least that he lets us see, like those recorded in the Bible), I can believe that “as far as we know,” we can determine distances in space. Of course, we could still be wrong, not only because of miraculous events but because of natural phenomena we have not detected yet, which might be capable of changing the speed of light at some point across that distance. I think I read recently that there was an experiment that was able to slow down some photons so that they arrived at a time that would be slower than the speed of light, even if only by a very small amount. If the experiment is valid, and scientists can do this in a lab, what’s to say it’s not already happening in the universe such that many of our distance measurements could be shown at some point to be incorrect?

Those experiments involve light traveling in a medium with electromagnetic properties (example: water or glass…that is why glass lenses change the direction light travels to focus, or why objects under water appear to be in a different place than they really are). In a medium light travels slower than “the speed of light in a vacuum”. You can make light stop in the right medium (and they have nearly done that). That is not the same as light in a vacuum whose speed is a universal constant.

I am trying to get you and others to think about it…and it apparently isn’t working.

Let me try it one more time.

1- You believe in a young universe, correct?

2- The Sun emits light, correct?

3- Where does the energy for that light come from? What process produces it? Simple answer here. I am not trying to trap you, I just want to see what you answer.

[Mark_Smith]

3- Where does the energy for that light come from? What process produces it? Simple answer here. I am not trying to trap you, I just want to see what you answer.

The belief at this point is that, light (photons), I am assuming we are talking about visible light, is emitted from the surface of the sun, when atoms loose energy from their excited state to their ground state, thereby releasing photons. The atoms near the surface reach an excited state from Gamma and X-rays that are released at the core of the sun. Because of the density of the sun these Gamma and X-rays take anywhere from a few thousand years to up to a million years, depending on different estimates. These Gamma and X-rays are produced primarily by Proton-Proton cycle reactions. This is true for smaller stars like our sun. No, I didn’t copy this from wikipedia (I paid attention in Chemistry :) ).

I say it is only a belief because 1) we can’t observe the core, 2) we believe this is the process by measuring, not the process, but the output of the process, 3) we extrapolate what we see by the processes we measure on earth and 4) there is a lot of complexity to the middle of the sun, and while we see a lot of stuff, we also see some stuff that doesn’t always mesh up, like the number of neutrino’s detected is less than theoretically predicted and so on. Because without an observational model we couldn’t understand any of this, we overlay uniformitarianism to allow us to make sense of what we see and drive us to the conclusion that what we see, meshes with what we know.

For the sake of your discussion and because I have no reason to doubt what is proposed, I agree with this is how light is produced.

I am a neutrino specialist. The answer is mixing of the flavor of neutrinos. This was proposed in the 60s and verified maybe 10 years ago.

Anyway, given the amount of time I have available I am bowing out.

Have a great rest of the week!

[Mark_Smith]

Those experiments involve light traveling in a medium with electromagnetic properties (example: water or glass…that is why glass lenses change the direction light travels to focus, or why objects under water appear to be in a different place than they really are). In a medium light travels slower than “the speed of light in a vacuum”. You can make light stop in the right medium (and they have nearly done that). That is not the same as light in a vacuum whose speed is a universal constant.

However, we know that space that we’ve observed is not 100% vacuum that is free of matter (even if it’s 99.9999x or whatever). Obviously, we haven’t been able to gather samples of all the matter in space between here and another galaxy. Using observations we have been able to make (like our observation that the speed of light in a vacuum is, at least as far as we can determine, constant), I’m sure that scientists will examine the light received and then try to determine what is there based on any modifications to the properties of the light that is received. However, since we don’t actually know what is there, those theories might be incorrect, and might be modified just as Newton’s laws have been modified in light of new discoveries. For all we really know, the light may be being modified in a way we can’t detect, so that our estimations of distances are incorrect. The universe is so large, and so little of it has actually been explored by humans, that it’s likely we don’t even know what we don’t know.

I don’t think that any of us here are trying to say that science is useless. It does, however, have limitations, and of course, theories are changed all the time in light of new discoveries. Given these limits, I don’t find it hard to compartmentalize (and not try to reconcile) the differences in what God writes in his word vs. what science says is “true.” Science is great as far as we can trust all the observations made, but even there we probably don’t understand all the ways in which the observer effect may come into play. I realize that you will now think that such thinking makes all of science completely useless and not worth studying since such thinking doesn’t trust all the measurements. I would counter that by saying that in some ways, such a conclusion is not a lot different from thinking that since we can’t understand perfectly (or maybe even very well) everything written in Revelation, that it is then not worth studying. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ll sum up dcbii and dgszweda with the “there is no way to know” argument. Hence, I started this whole thing by saying YEC makes astronomy pointless….and you guys for 3 pages have done nothing but verify it.

Off to work.

[Mark_Smith]

I’ll sum up dcbii and dgszweda with the “there is no way to know” argument. Hence, I started this whole thing by saying YEC makes astronomy pointless….and you guys for 3 pages have done nothing but verify it.

Off to work.

I think there’s a large amount of space between “trusted as 100% accurate” and “pointless,” but if it works for you to classify my thinking as the latter since I don’t accept the former, knock yourself out.