Thursday 3 October 2024

Continued Debate with David C. Campbell


HGL's F.B. writings: Debate on Geology · Creation vs. Evolution: 4.5 Billion Years Worth of Nuclear Decay, Before the End of Day Three? · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Continuing debate with David C. Campbell on YEC, OE, Palaeontology · Continued Debate with David C. Campbell

On Wednesday 2 October, we are approaching tomorrow's feast of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, when this will be published; and our four exchanges (as already made) are likely to leave a certain impression. He may look focussed. I may look sprawling in all different directions. Do take into account that each time he makes a very focussed and coherent speech, basically, he's ignoring most of what I had answered, while I am sprawling in all directions, because I answer each and every point he makes. And yes, sometimes the answers lie in very different fields from the one he approached it with, and so I have to sprawl out into different directions. He'd be playing a lot fairer if he also had the ambition to answer each point, but he might consider that as "immature" and "bad form" and he might very certainly find that less paedagogical, since he imagines that I need to be lectured, and trying to answer each point would be to stoop to my low level of debating, instead of keeping aloof as "my" lecturer.

Wednesday 11:35
25.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
Interpreting early and medieval Christian comments relating to the age of the earth can be challenging. As Dal Prete points out, “young”-type phrasing may mean “of finite age”. Conversely, “old”-type phrasing may mean “origin not detected from physical study”, which could just mean that any physical traces of the creation event have been obliterated over time, not that the total time had to be especially long. But this highlights the fact that they were not thinking in terms of modern creation science or of modern geological understanding. Old and young earth views coexisted without being generally seen as theologically essential. As a result, when application of Steno’s principles (not unique to him but the first major publication) began to produce strong evidence for a long pre-human history of the earth, these results were largely treated as historical supplements, showing that the Bible had omitted any significant discussion of a large chunk of theologically irrelevant time. The first book to publish a series of pictures illustrating life and geological conditions through time concluded with a scene of Eden.

Moreover, the juxtaposition of the seven-day sequence of Genesis 1:3-2:3 with the one day of Genesis 2:4 strongly suggests that chronology is not the point. Genesis 2 and Psalm 104 do not follow the sequence of Genesis 1. The weekly sabbath is mirrored in a sabbath year and the jubilee, a sabbath of sabbath years. Other ancient Near Eastern texts use a seven-day sequence, with grammatical peculiarities similar to those of Genesis 1, to express perfect completion, not a literal calendar week. All this goes to suggest that the Bible is not teaching us the when of creation, but rather focuses on the Who and why.

No claim to scientifically support a young earth against an old earth has had merit. All are attempts to explain away the plain evidence of creation; where young-earth models are adequate to even make any tests against the evidence, they fail. A young-earth position is thus left with three basic options with regard to science. As Einstein realized, time is not consistent across all observers. From the viewpoint of someone traveling close enough to the speed of light, the earth can be as young as you like, while also being as old as the geological and astronomical evidence says it is. This raises the question of why should it be described from a high-speed viewpoint. Gerald Schroeder, a Jewish physicist, has developed this kind of view. A second option is to honestly admit that the scientific evidence, to the best of our present knowledge, clearly points to an ancient earth, while hoping that better young-earth models will be developed in the future. However, the only way to possibly develop better young-earth models is to be honest about the failings of the existing ones, something that is not characteristic of the current young-earth movement. Given that there is no particular theological reason to expect the earth to be young, and the fact that young-earth models have had no success in the 250 years since the firm establishment of geological evidence of an ancient earth, I cannot say that I see much point in trying to find young-earth models. But given that science is a human process, there is always the chance that a new idea will come along that is better than our existing model. Contrary to the Kuhnian picture of scientific revolutions, though, a successful new idea has to be a better explanation for all the evidence, not merely claiming that the existing model has a problem. A third approach would be to affirm that God created the earth with a built-in apparent history. This was promoted by Gosse in his book Omphalos, and has generally been rather unpopular because it is often perceived as making God dishonest. Of course, the wine at Cana would have instantaneously had the appearance of roughly a year’s work by a grapevine and some yeast. That is inherently necessary for it to be wine. But Jesus didn’t produce it in a bottle labeled Chateau Naboth 8 BC, nor did He include bits of dirt and bugs for authenticity. Those would have testified to a non-existent history and are not essential to the existence of wine. Similarly, the fact that plate tectonics is currently building new seafloor and destroying old seafloor at the rate of a few centimeters per year doesn’t mean that God had to leave the bottom off the oceans if He were to have created them a few thousand years ago. But if the seafloor were created instantaneously, there would be no need to build it with layers of sediment and fossils, old sunken islands, patterns of magnetic polarity, decreasing temperature, etc. that all point to a long history of gradual formation, motion, and eventual destruction. Matching the actual appearance of creation requires not just an apparent age but a full apparent history, and any use of this approach must account for why things would be created that way.

Being consistent in assessing the merit of arguments is essential. The Bible has extensive warnings against partiality and double standards. Indeed, it is prudent to examine arguments that seem to fit what we want to hear more strictly than those that go against our views, given the natural bias towards accepting what we want to hear. “The temperature changed really fast” is not a good model to evade the problems inherent in the idea of glaciers zipping back and forth across a continent in a few hundred years. Why did they change? How fast? How much? What climate models show that the consequences of such temperature change would actually produce such fast expansion and retreat of glaciers? How would those changes affect other parts of the world? Do we see evidence of such effects? Such detail is necessary to a credible scientific model, whereas the vague “it changed fast” is suited for an excuse to ignore inconvenient facts.

If there were an abrupt increase in the supply of 14C, we should see evidence for that. But there are no sudden increase in nearby supernovas, no prehistoric atmospheric bomb tests, nor other sources of radiation impacting the atmosphere. Measuring 14C against tree rings, lake varves, ice cores, and cave formations does not find any abrupt shift of the sort that is necessary for a young-earth claim of rapidly changing 14C supply. 14C matches the Bible’s chronology. Changing decay rates messes with very fundamental laws of physics. As fine-tuning arguments point out, this is a bad idea – atoms become unstable and the earth melts from the heat involved.

Cave formations are also an important additional category of land fossils overlying marine fossils. Most caves are holes dissolved into limestone. In turn, most limestones are marine deposits with fossils of ocean life. Making a cave requires piling up the carbonate sediment, cementing it into rock, and then exposing it to acidic groundwater and porewater. Many standard cave formations such as stalactites require forming in air, not underwater. But caves and similar karstic holes often contain various land vertebrate fossils. Famous examples include the Triassic fissure fill faunas of England, the Bernissart iguanodons, and the Gray site sinkhole in northeastern Tennessee, as well as the numerous Pleistocene cave faunas. Pleistocene bone accumulations associated with outcrops of ancient salt deposits and the La Brea tar fauna pose similar problems, having a marine source for what attracted the animals.

Even if we were to accept speeding up the 14C calendar, that is incompatible with claiming that all the Pleistocene glacial features came from a single event. Some are young enough to have measurable 14C dates, some are too old. Different glacial deposits in the same region show notably different levels of weathering. Thermoluminescence and related methods of dating show different ages. Amino acid racemization shows different ages. Newer glacial features disrupt older ones. And then there are all the traces of more ancient glaciations from the Precambrian and Paleozoic. Like all scientific young-earth arguments, the claim of a single post-Flood glaciation relies on either ignorance of or ignoring the actual total set of geological and astronomical evidence and is merely an attempt to explain away one detail that the person arguing has heard of, not an honest effort to understand God’s creation based on the evidence.

If the earth was created a few billions of years ago, and if change is not so fast as to completely obliterate the evidence of its history, then we should see evidence of some slower and some more rapid events. If the creation was only a few thousand years ago, every geologic event must fit into that timeframe, with nothing taking any longer. Thus, the young-earth position has an inherent disadvantage in that any evidence of one thing being old is a problem, whereas in an old earth some things are young and some are old, making disproof more difficult. Jumping from argument to argument without taking stock of how many are bad is not a good way to make a case; you need to focus on a particular point and thoroughly assess the evidence, admitting and addressing problems rather than bringing up something else.

Thursday 02:36
26.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
"Interpreting early and medieval Christian comments relating to the age of the earth can be challenging."

I think I'm about as good as Dal Prete on it. If I had had a degree, Latin would have been my "major" in US terms. Greek was my second subject.

"As Dal Prete points out, “young”-type phrasing may mean “of finite age”. Conversely, “old”-type phrasing may mean “origin not detected from physical study”, which could just mean that any physical traces of the creation event have been obliterated over time, not that the total time had to be especially long."

You consistently:
a) refuse to cite actual examples;
b) give me Dal Prete's assessment, so I can't check what he reports as being said, but need to take his authority.

"But this highlights the fact that they were not thinking in terms of modern creation science or of modern geological understanding."

So?

"Old and young earth views coexisted without being generally seen as theologically essential."

You have not provided a single direct old earth view by citation.

"As a result, when application of Steno’s principles (not unique to him but the first major publication) began to produce strong evidence for a long pre-human history of the earth,"

You are not saying what kind of people were doing the "piling up" of such applications into that kind of conclusions. Protestants or Catholics. Or freethinkers, like James Hutton, a Deist.

"these results were largely treated as historical supplements, showing that the Bible had omitted any significant discussion of a large chunk of theologically irrelevant time."

You are not saying who treated it so. Catholics, Protestants or Freethinkers. Hutton was a Deist. Lyell was an Anglican of the Broad Church variety, a "Christian of sorts" but flirting with freethinkers.

"The first book to publish a series of pictures illustrating life and geological conditions through time concluded with a scene of Eden."

You are not saying what the theological position was of the author of this book.

"Moreover, the juxtaposition of the seven-day sequence of Genesis 1:3-2:3 with the one day of Genesis 2:4 strongly suggests that chronology is not the point."

That's your exegesis, not the reception.

"Genesis 2 and Psalm 104 do not follow the sequence of Genesis 1."

Genesis 2 is a closeup on Day 6. Psalm 103 (as we number it) involves references to the Flood and is overall an account of the result, the creation we live in, not of the process, the creation event.

"No claim to scientifically support a young earth against an old earth has had merit."

Broad claim.

"All are attempts to explain away the plain evidence of creation; where young-earth models are adequate to even make any tests against the evidence, they fail."

Also a broad claim.

You have not backed it up against my model for Flood Palaeontology, if I may coin the term. You have also not backed it up against my Carbon 14 recalibration.

"However, the only way to possibly develop better young-earth models is to be honest about the failings of the existing ones, something that is not characteristic of the current young-earth movement."

It's characteristic enough of me.

"Given that there is no particular theological reason to expect the earth to be young, and the fact that young-earth models have had no success in the 250 years since the firm establishment of geological evidence of an ancient earth, I cannot say that I see much point in trying to find young-earth models."

1774. That's fourteen years before 1788, Theory of the Earth by James Hutton. Leibnitz' Protogaea is too early, so is Benoît de Maillet's Telliamed. Oryctographia Carniolica by Belsazar Hacquet seems to have concentrated on contemporary geology, not projecting back into the process of how things formed. It seems you are referencing a Geology book that's so unknown it's not on wikipedia, unless you were using 250 as a very round figure for Theory of the Earth.

"A third approach would be to affirm that God created the earth with a built-in apparent history. This was promoted by Gosse in his book Omphalos, and has generally been rather unpopular because it is often perceived as making God dishonest."

I heartily agree, and the Young Earth movement at least in CMI and IRC and AiG, which you seem not to be keeping up with, as well as myself, reject the Omphalos theory.

"Of course, the wine at Cana would have instantaneously had the appearance of roughly a year’s work by a grapevine and some yeast. That is inherently necessary for it to be wine. But Jesus didn’t produce it in a bottle labeled Chateau Naboth 8 BC, nor did He include bits of dirt and bugs for authenticity."

Indeed.

"Similarly, the fact that plate tectonics is currently building new seafloor and destroying old seafloor at the rate of a few centimeters per year doesn’t mean that God had to leave the bottom off the oceans if He were to have created them a few thousand years ago."

Have you considered that plate tectonics would have been slowing down since the Flood?

"Being consistent in assessing the merit of arguments is essential. The Bible has extensive warnings against partiality and double standards."

I think CMI has a real fondness for stories when Old Earthers commit that fault. Meanwhile, a partiality for the word of God is not a double standard.

"Why did they change?"

Oard has his view on what the Flood would have entailed, and while I am not contradicting it, I'm at least supplementing it with a higher presence of ionising particles, during an era in which C-14 was partly produced 20 times as fast as today, up to the Younger Dryas.

"How fast?"

Younger Dryas ended 350 years after the Flood.

"How much?"

As much as needed, I'm not a meteorologist.

"What climate models show that the consequences of such temperature change would actually produce such fast expansion and retreat of glaciers?"

The Little Ice Age was a period from about 1550 to 1850 when certain regions experienced relatively cooler temperatures compared to the time before and after. Subsequently, until about 1940, glaciers around the world retreated as the climate warmed substantially.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850#Scale_at_the_global_level

1550 is 400 years before 1950, has a radiocarbon age of 320 years. 1750 is 200 years before, has a radiocarbon age of 160 years, while 1700, 250 years cal BP, had only 120 years BP. That was also a part that was very much colder.

So, 1550 to 1720, the missing years go up from 80 to 130. This means pmC went up from 100.972 to 101.585.

In 170 years, the original C-14 goes from 100 to 97.965, and is normally replaced by 2.035.

100.972 * 97.965 / 100 = 98.917
101.585 - 98.917 = 2.668 pmC points added

2.668 / 2.035 = 1.311 times normal speed.

What cooling can we then suspect of 20 times normal speed? A Little Ace Age, minus "little" = an Ice Age.

"How would those changes affect other parts of the world?"

How did the Ice Age as such affect other parts of the world? As lots of water was bound up in ice, sea levels were lower.

"Do we see evidence of such effects?"

Yes. Misdated.

"Such detail is necessary to a credible scientific model, whereas the vague “it changed fast” is suited for an excuse to ignore inconvenient facts."

For the carbon 14 levels as such, I already give such detail. I'd prefer a meteorologist to do what you ask for, but Michael Oard is not interested in my model, so far.

"If there were an abrupt increase in the supply of 14C, we should see evidence for that."

I suppose from the following you mean evidence of its production.

"But there are no sudden increase in nearby supernovas,"

Like you have them mapped out in time? I would say a supernova is usually observed the same year as it happens. Obviously, this is an option I have as a geocentric, with "parallax" not being parallax. And parallax trigonometry not being valid trigonometry.

And as I hold stars and Sun and Moon and planets are moved by angels, I suppose they also have the possibility to, on God's orders, provide more cosmic radiation. I think they did that with local direction against Sisera's army, and after the Flood, they did so to shorten human lifespans.

"no prehistoric atmospheric bomb tests,"

I think that the Mahabharata tends to at least suggest actual bombings in the pre-Flood world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_(weapon)

"nor other sources of radiation impacting the atmosphere."

Supposing you believe angels don't exist, don't move stars or Sun, or, doing so, have no influence on the output of cosmic rays.

"Measuring 14C against tree rings, lake varves, ice cores, and cave formations does not find any abrupt shift of the sort that is necessary for a young-earth claim of rapidly changing 14C supply."

Not convincing to someone finding that beyond a certain time back they are circular.

"14C matches the Bible’s chronology."

I suppose Carbon 14 as usually calibrated is what you mean. Well, from the time of Fall of Troy, a little before King David, I basically agree. For 1935 BC, the time of Genesis 14, nope and noper.

Reed mats would not be showing any reservoir effect, and they date for 3500 BC.

That would be calibrated 5450 BP = raw 4700~4600 BP, and NOT 3900 BP, as the real age for Genesis 14. That one would be cal BC 2400, not cal 1950 BC, and it's certainly not what we find in the reed mats either of them.

"Changing decay rates messes with very fundamental laws of physics."

I'm not doing that for C14, but if Uranium was decaying faster in Zircons, that could be a non-atmospheric source for more carbon 14.

"Cave formations are also an important additional category of land fossils overlying marine fossils. Most caves are holes dissolved into limestone. In turn, most limestones are marine deposits with fossils of ocean life. Making a cave requires piling up the carbonate sediment, cementing it into rock, and then exposing it to acidic groundwater and porewater. Many standard cave formations such as stalactites require forming in air, not underwater. But caves and similar karstic holes often contain various land vertebrate fossils. Famous examples include the Triassic fissure fill faunas of England, the Bernissart iguanodons, and the Gray site sinkhole in northeastern Tennessee, as well as the numerous Pleistocene cave faunas. Pleistocene bone accumulations associated with outcrops of ancient salt deposits and the La Brea tar fauna pose similar problems, having a marine source for what attracted the animals."

I would consider some cave fauna would be post-Flood.

"Even if we were to accept speeding up the 14C calendar, that is incompatible with claiming that all the Pleistocene glacial features came from a single event. Some are young enough to have measurable 14C dates, some are too old."

Is there a) a definite example of a carbon age before 39,000 BP? b) this one cannot be explained by reservoir effect, given the Carbon 14 was rising? 20,000 BP would be within my calibration for Noah's remaining lifespan after the Flood. 18,000 BC would be between the following close to 21,000 and 17,000 BC:

2738 av. J.-Chr.
11,073 / 11,069 pcm, donc daté à 20 938 av. J.-Chr.
2712 av. J.-Chr.
17,576 pcm, donc daté à 17 062 av. J.-Chr.


"Different glacial deposits in the same region show notably different levels of weathering."

Different angles of the weather?

"Thermoluminescence and related methods of dating show different ages."

TL and related are on my view highly erratic. The human presence in Australia has ages like 40 000 or 60 000 BP from TL, while Mungo Man has carbon ages like 20 000 BP.

"Amino acid racemization shows different ages."

The process is not in and of itself uniform.

"Newer glacial features disrupt older ones."

OK, unless some of the older glacial features are from Flood instead of glaciation. But you have given no examples.

"And then there are all the traces of more ancient glaciations from the Precambrian and Paleozoic."

Known to be such by what criteria? Radiometric datings would be in non-carbon and highly erratic methods.

"Like all scientific young-earth arguments, the claim of a single post-Flood glaciation relies on either ignorance of or ignoring the actual total set of geological and astronomical evidence and is merely an attempt to explain away one detail that the person arguing has heard of, not an honest effort to understand God’s creation based on the evidence."

Did I ever tell you how obnoxious it is of you to be talking down that way? I'm not a teen you are educating, I'm 56 and a communicator on the opposite team (OK, not accepted by "the team" but still).

"If the earth was created a few billions of years ago, and if change is not so fast as to completely obliterate the evidence of its history, then we should see evidence of some slower and some more rapid events."

We should not see evidence of rapid "limit events" like the filling of oceans with salt and nickel.

"If the creation was only a few thousand years ago, every geologic event must fit into that timeframe, with nothing taking any longer."

Sure.

"Thus, the young-earth position has an inherent disadvantage in that any evidence of one thing being old is a problem,"

Only if it is conclusive.

"Jumping from argument to argument without taking stock of how many are bad is not a good way to make a case; you need to focus on a particular point and thoroughly assess the evidence, admitting and addressing problems rather than bringing up something else."

The one jumping I did was in response to your arguments. As for my own assessment, I have very thoroughly, as far as my resources were allowing it, assessed both carbon 14 and superposition of faunas.

Thursday 03:15
26.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
Since you brought up Biblical exegesis and reactions to the Old Earth theses, the Catholic authors approved by the Church were by 1900 to 1920 divided into three positions:

  • literal YEC
  • Day Age, with sixth creation age ending with Adam's creation 6000 to 7500 years ago
  • Gap theory, with creation days repairing quickly after a disaster bigger than the Flood, and this leading up to creation of Adam 6000 to 7500 years ago.


Or, at the utmost, 10 000 years ago.

The view of Genesis 5 to 11 was basically intact, and it was the Patristic one of St. Augustine of Hippo, as per his City of God. He is much more specific in wording than "earth is young" ....

Here is a comment from Fr. Haydock on Genesis 3:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. (Haydock)


So, the concern for keeping the history of mankind short is much more solid than that of keeping pre-human events to shorter than 144 hours. Both in motivation (see the reliability of Genesis 3, for instance), and in reception. No one questions this thing of Genesis 5 and 11 prior to Archibald Sayce, and the guys who eventually among Catholics accept him would include a 1940's 1950's or 1960's theologian and one earlier in the 19th C. but in Germany, under pressure from Bismarck.

Having pre-human events short as well have obviously become a concern for me bc of Carbon 14. If the atmosphere is billions of years old, no way that carbon 14 was low enough for a Biblical chronology of mankind to misdate by more than 30 000 years.

Thursday 15:22
18.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
There, the problem is what is meant by the beginning of humanity. In other words, where does Adam fit into the geological chronology, for those of us who care about both? There are several different models, some of which follow a chronology fairly similar to the result of assuming that the genealogies in Genesis 1 give a fairly complete and accurate account of the years since Adam and Eve, and others that assume that those numbers are figurative and/or less complete. Are Adam and Eve the exclusive ancestors of all modern humans? Then they would have to be quite far back in time based on the amount of genetic variation and population genetics (William Lane Craig has developed that idea). Are they in everyone's family tree, but not the exclusive ancestors? That would simplify where spouses for A&E's kids came from, for example. S. Joshua Swamidass has developed that model. Another idea is that Adam and Eve are the ancestors specifically of the Semitic peoples. The technology mentioned in Genesis 4 isn't known until early Neolithic, ca. 8000 BC or so. But Genesis 1-2 is talking of the spiritual origins of humanity while archaeology and paleontology get at the physical processes of building our bodies. Because of this, there's very little data to pin down how they match up.

Thursday 20:42
26.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
Denying that Adam and Eve are the exclusive ancestors of all human creatures of this world makes nonsense of them being "the first man" and the first woman.

It makes nonsense of the idea that all men are bound to God's plan for Adam's and Eve's relation insofar as they want sex.

On the other hand, putting Adam and Eve 750,000 BP makes nonsense of Genesis 3 being reliably transmitted from Adam to Moses.

Remember, Genesis is history, not prophetic vision, except for the six days.

So, the one solution is, every bone and mandible that can be tied to us by morphology or DNA is from later than when Adam and Eve lived in the Biblical chronology.

The idea of genealogies being incomplete does not just destroy the reliability of transmission, but is also based off Archibald Sayce letting Royal Genealogies of Babylon, perhaps Egypt too, interpret the Biblical ones. Recall that those Royal Genealogies like other statements Ancient Near East Pagans made of their kings, is bound up with prideful boasting. A king whose great-grandfather had been king may not have wanted to stress how many of his direct ancestors hadn't been kings. It's as if Lewis XV had called himself "son of" Lewis XIV, his great-grandfather had in fact survived two heirs presumptive. Our own Charles XVI Gustaf was grandson of the previous king, his father having died in an air plane crash.

In Egyptian or Babylonian terms, he would have been the "son of" Gustaf VI Adolf. As we have no direct indication of royal status in the line from Adam to Noah (unlike the one from Cain to Lamech), this should not be an issue. And especially, if they had been royals, Henoch would have been the kind of intermediate generation who never got to rule. So, we have very good evidence against Archibald Sayce's interpretation in the Bible text.

Some more:

"The technology mentioned in Genesis 4 isn't known until early Neolithic, ca. 8000 BC or so."

That's the post-Flood recovery of large scale farming. At Babel.

"But Genesis 1-2 is talking of the spiritual origins of humanity while archaeology and paleontology get at the physical processes of building our bodies. Because of this, there's very little data to pin down how they match up."

Man is a composite of spirit and body, and the Bible speaks of both together.

As you mentioned Swamidass, it's horrible theology.

"Image and likeness of God"' is not our standing before God, it's our nature. No one can have our mind and body without being that.

So, if Swamidass says "men from outside Eden" were NOT image and likeness of God, he has accused the children of Adam and Eve, if not of the infertility, at least of the rape part of bestiality.

But if they WERE image and likeness of God, it's also horrid theology, since it makes nonsense of Romans 5.

Tuesday 17:32
1.X.2024
David C. Campbell
Note that Luke includes an ancestor not listed in the Masoretic text of Genesis in Jesus's genealogy. Where we do have more than one source on biblical genealogies, it is quite common for individuals to be skipped over - the point is showing connections rather than an exhaustive list.

Tuesday 20:04
1.X.2024
Vous avez envoyé
That's one example, and very small percentage of the genealogy.

Three solutions are possible.

1) Scribal error in Luke, carried over into LXX, but not into MT or Vulgate Genesis

2) LXX text is original as it stands (less probable) or

3) (more probable), MT omitted an actually existing II Cainan by damnatio memoriae and LXX contains a cultural translation, as Greeks didn't have this custom.

Tuesday 23:03
1.X.2024
David C. Campbell
We must be careful in our interpretation not to read things into the Bible. God calls us to be His witnesses – faithfully telling the truth about what we know, not PR agents trying to put a flashy spin on the evidence.

What does it mean to be created in God’s image? It does not take much familiarity with the Bible to see that the Mormon claim that this is a physical likeness to God is wrong. Rather, it refers to our spiritual nature. How do humans receive that spiritual nature? The Bible tells us nothing of the mechanisms. This has long been a subject of speculation with regard to the souls of each new child, but we don’t really have any information to decide among the possibilities. Even the nature of the relationship between the physical body and the spirit is not defined in any detail. We have a spiritual nature, which differentiates us from animals, gives us responsibility, survives our physical death, and can reflect God in a way that other aspects of creation don’t. Similarly, if we take the data from creation seriously and recognize the evidence that our physical bodies were created through a process of biological evolution, we might ask where in the process are the spirits acquired and how. But we have no data to answer the question. Perhaps a more direct miraculous approach of putting in a spirit at the right time. Perhaps God designed evolution such that having a spirit would happen “naturally” (i.e., following His ordinary patterns of diecting and sustaining creation) at the point when humanity, in His providence, reached a certain level of mental capacity. Perhaps God built spirituality up by degrees, with partial components present in animals. Interesting speculation, but nothing more. We are to deal with the fact that we and our neighbors have souls; doing so is not particularly affected by how God created them. The Bible tells us that there are spiritual things without a physical component, and physical things that don’t have spirits, but it does not spell out just how our physical and spiritual natures connect and interrelate.

If Adam and Eve were representatives out of an existing population of organisms physically similar to humans, God could endow others with spirituality similar to what He did in creating them. Adam and Eve would still be the first humans in the sense of being the first ones in God’s image, while the problems of how Adam and Eve’s children could find spouses without violating laws on incest, who Cain migh be afraid of, etc. are explained by additional individuals also receiving the image of God (and receiving the marring of that image thorugh sinfulness). Given that we can become children of God through Jesus without being physically descended from Jesus, transfer of spiritual status from a representative is a quite reasonable possibility. I’m not sure why you think that not being the exclusive ancestors of all humans has anything to do with what is a proper marital relationship. Some have speculated that the negatively portrayed sons of God-daughters of men pairing could be descendants of Adam and Eve breeding with physically similar forms (perhaps Neanderthals?), but the fact that somebody (however one interprets the “sons of God” there, multiple ideas exist) behaved inappropriately in getting a mate doesn’t change what the law is concerning what is appropriate.

The Bible does not say that Genesis 3 was transmitted from Adam to Moses. We don’t know to what extent Moses was working with older records versus recording more direct revelation from God when he provided information about the distant past. But Adam and Eve being about 750,000 BP does not make nonsense of the reliability of Genesis 3. It would merely mean that Genesis 3 and Genesis 11 do not list all of the generations and years, because that wasn’t the point that God wanted to convey. Creation science, on the other hand, does make a mockery of the reliability of Scriptures by proclaiming that all the false young-earth claims about the scientific evidence are biblical, rather than being honest and admitting that the scientific data favor other interpretations of Genesis. We need to seek to understand what Moses meant when he wrote, and thus should do our best to understand how ancient Near Eastern people would have understoood the words, rather than imposing a modern historical-scientific interpretation on a text written long before that style of writing was developed. Likewise, the scientific data provide helpful evidence in deciding what interpretations are more likely, as Augustine pointed out over a thousand years ago.

Again, the internal evidence in the Bible shows that genealogies often skip over people. Matthew selected certain individuals to give particular numbers of generations, despite having a more extensive list of the generations in Kings and Chronicles; likewise, he has rather fewer generations between the exile and Jesus than Luke does, suggesting some were skipped over there. (There’s also the question of why the two genealogies differ in the names, with several possibilities proposed.) The drastic difference in the number of generations listed for Joshua versus Moses, and many other similar cases, points to inclusion of selected individuals rather than an exhaustive tally. This poses no theological problem; we don’t need to know Moses’ complete family tree. But it does mean that the Bible does not tell us all that we would need to know to figure out how long ago any of the events in it happened. Modern young-earth creationism insists that such a chronology is theologically essential, and prioritizes defending a young earth over careful honesty about the evidence. By putting the traditions of men over the commandment of God, it has become a dangerous legalistic false gospel, rather than a credible Christian option. But the reality is that Genesis, and the rest of the Bible, is not history in the same sense that a modern history textbook is. What it says about history is true, but we need to be careful that we are reading it correctly. And its purpose is not to tell us a chronicle of past events for the benefit of historians, but rather to provide examples of God’s dealing with humanity, teaching what we are to believe concerning Him and what duties He requires of us. For example, Joshua tells of the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan and defeats of the Canaanites. But it also has quite extensive discussion of how the people needed to finish the job of conquest and not complacently mingle with the surrounding peoples, absorbing their theological errors. Thus, when the text states that Joshua and the army wiped out all that breathed, it’s obvious that is hyperbole. Such was customary at the time – Pharoah Merneptah boasted of having exterminated Israel, probably just a few decades later, whe all he actually did was defeat a group of them in battle (and incidentally demonstrating that “Israel” existed as an entity before 1200 BC, no matter what liberal critics claim). Besides the use of such figures of speech, the Bible simply doesn’t tell us a lot that a modern historian would like to know. We need additional information to fill in details. For example, the Hebrew text states that Pharoah Neco was going to Assyria. He was in a hurry and had his army with him, so it’s obvious this was no mere diplomatic visit. Older versions understandably translated that he was going against Assyria. Now we have the Babylonian chronicle, and know that Neco was going to Assyria as an ally to prop it up against Babylon when Josiah sought to meddle in world politics. The Bible does not mention Babylon there; the point was to trace Josiah’s disastrous political move rather than to tell us about the geopolitical situation in the late 7th century BC.

Population genetics enables calculation of the approximate population size in the past needed to produce the observed current genetic diversity. From that, we can determine that all humans do not descend from a single pair any more recently than several hundred thousand years ago. The young-earth claims that the genetic diversity could derive fromjust Adam and Eve about six thousand years ago are simply not honest (like the foolish claims that “genetic entropy” points to a recent origin of humanity). Genetic data also indicate that all modern humans have an ancestor in common (along with plenty of ancestors not in common) as recently as a few thousand years ago, depending on exactly how much people moved around and mixed in the past. To dismiss those because they don’t fit a young-earth view is not honest. Rather, it is necessary to critically examine whether the young-earth position is sound, as well as whether there might be some issues with the calculations. Likewise, genetic data show that many modern humans have a little DNA derived from Neanderthal, Denisovian, or other prehistoric groups who were more different from the main human ancestry lineage. Were those others fully human in a spiritual sense, or merely physically similar? We don’t really know.

Wednesday 10:04
2.X.2024
Vous avez envoyé
When it comes to your speculation on the human spirit, you definitely:
  • limit the Christian doctrine to direct statements in the Bible (excluding for instance scholastic philosophy)
  • and wittle down the specificity of the Biblical statements.


"Similarly, if we take the data from creation seriously and recognize the evidence that our physical bodies were created through a process of biological evolution, we might ask where in the process are the spirits acquired and how."

That's not taking data from Creation seriously, it's taking our spiritual nature woefully little serious.

A man who speaks a human language cannot descend from someone who didn't. OK, handicapped people can have children, and these get language from surroundings, but you know what I mean, I hope. It cannot be (and this not just for reasons of known history) that either of us has a father or a mother who didn't speak human language (unless supplemented, etc). It cannot be they were in a middle stage which means the four grandparents didn't speak a human language. It cannot be there were several middle stages so that dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad and the other guys in his generation to a total of 1024 ancestor roles, possibly as many different people, didn't speak human language. Intermediates between human language and the way animals communicate are simply not possible ... or they are downward intermediates, in handicapped creatures who depend on people with full human language for survival.

"Perhaps God designed evolution such that having a spirit would happen “naturally” (i.e., following His ordinary patterns of diecting and sustaining creation) at the point when humanity, in His providence, reached a certain level of mental capacity."

Just plain groan. No. We don't have "more" mental capacity than cats or dolphins (though arguably we do that too), we have a very different kind of mental capacity. It's like saying a certain degree of catness would at some stage finally breed a dolphin or sth God could turn into a dolphin without absurdity.

"We are to deal with the fact that we and our neighbors have souls; doing so is not particularly affected by how God created them."

Right now it is. You are making heinous speculations on how God created spiritual souls, and mistreating mine, by having to deal with that, but far more to the point, the discussion we were having is not one of Christian morals, it's one of Christian doctrine. We definitely have sufficient data on human souls, notably that they have language and how language is transmitted, so that we know that what you pretend "could have happened" just plain couldn't. Even the omnipotence of God couldn't make it happen, because God is tied to His Wisdom, He cannot use His omnipotence in useless ways. And introducing the human spirit-soul in an evolutionary manner would be about as useless and absurd an investment of omnipotence as turning a very talented cat into a dolphin.

"The Bible tells us that there are spiritual things without a physical component,"

Actually not all that directly. You are smuggling in some scholastic philosophy.

"and physical things that don’t have spirits, but it does not spell out just how our physical and spiritual natures connect and interrelate."

That's why we have scholastic philosophy.

"If Adam and Eve were representatives out of an existing population of organisms physically similar to humans, God could endow others with spirituality similar to what He did in creating them. Adam and Eve would still be the first humans in the sense of being the first ones in God’s image, while the problems of how Adam and Eve’s children could find spouses without violating laws on incest, who Cain migh be afraid of, etc. are explained by additional individuals also receiving the image of God (and receiving the marring of that image thorugh sinfulness)."

Those specific laws against incest didn't exist yet. Cain would by 230 after Creation have seen a few more children of Adam and Eve, and grandchildren too, than just himself or Abel. Or 130, if you prefer Masoretic chronology.

But pretending that other people who were NEITHER image of God, NOR marred received both qualities from Adam and Eve means reducing both statements to a kind of theological status. The image is like the cat and the dolphin. It's not like the sinner and the saint. The marring is like an acquired physical handicap that's hereditary, like sickle cell anemia. Neither is just a kind of theological status. Adam and Eve can represent us when we are made and born, because we descend from them. There is no reason why they would have had some kind of Calvary like ability to transfer real humanity to people other than themselves, like Christ did for us. The grace of adoption came from a sacrifice, not from a simple being born that way (btw, I don't think homosexuals are). It came from Jesus being God and Man, not just from Him being Man.

You are very vague about what the mental quality of the others were before this supposed miracle. Could they already speak? Then Adam and Eve would not have been the first images of God. Couldn't they? Well, then the arrival of the image and of the language would have been just as much of an upheaval in their existences as becoming human when a descendant of Adam wanted a wife (or husband?).

"I’m not sure why you think that not being the exclusive ancestors of all humans has anything to do with what is a proper marital relationship."

If you say that those "outside the garden" could already speak and consent, then Adam and Eve were not the first humans. If you say those "outside the garden" couldn't speak and consent (and that's the only rational way of dealing with a statement like "not yet images of God"), then they would not have consented to marriage in speech.

"The Bible does not say that Genesis 3 was transmitted from Adam to Moses."

No. The Bible doesn't even say Genesis 50 was transmitted from Joseph or his sons to Moses. Again, I am a Catholic, and I do NOT depend on this idiotic sola scriptura approach, and you are using it in a very foul way, like prying in every possible infamy about God, Man, Bible reliability into chinks of what the Bible didn't explicitly adress. When Luther and Calvin cried "sola scripura" they opened the door to the likes of you. A bad thing to do.

"We don’t know to what extent Moses was working with older records versus recording more direct revelation from God when he provided information about the distant past."

With Genesis 1 prior to the creation of Man, we know someone (Adam, Moses, both) recorded more direct revelation from God, like John on Patmos did for Apocalypse 22. As soon as Adam and Eve exist, there is someone to record. You pretend there was a genealogy not showing who begat whom, but who one was connected to. This would not have been what came from God's mouth to Moses when they spoke on Sinai. This could only have come from people actually recording. But even if one admitted gaps not at all accounted for (unlike Matthean genealogy of Jesus or II Cainan in Masoretic text, if he wasn't a scribal error in Luke, then transferred to LXX, those would be gaps accounted for), going even double the amount of time between Adam and Abraham (like 6000 instead of 3000 years) would seriously jeopardise the reliable transmission of Genesis 3. All of the chapter is what Adam or Eve or both could have observed, even verse 22. Probably God spoke to angels and Adam heard only part of it. This way he knew he had lost familiarity with God. Next verse again records what he could observe.

Now, you have very serious problems in "extending the genealogy" and compensating in pretending "God revealed it to Moses" and doing all this in the name of reconciling the Bible with the "evidence" (or rather Evolutionist and Old Earth interpretation of it), since you would by extending genealogies get to a point where (on your view, as bronze age and iron age wouldn't be post-Flood recoveries of metallurgy, unlike how I see it), a descendant of Cain was both in the Bronze age and the Iron age in one lifespan, and himself beginning each, in the Biblical record, while this would contradict what you consider the "record" examined by scientists. I presume you would not be putting the Flood later than 2900 BC?

"But Adam and Eve being about 750,000 BP does not make nonsense of the reliability of Genesis 3. It would merely mean that Genesis 3 and Genesis 11 do not list all of the generations and years, because that wasn’t the point that God wanted to convey."


If God didn't intend to list all generations (or all with some small leeway for II Cainan, possibly), why so much genealogical detail at all? There is simply no mystical or spiritual meaning to the lifespans, and even the succession of names has no known spiritual interpretation for Genesis 11 (I'm aware of "Man appointed mortal sorrow ..." for Genesis 5). Again, if God revealed Genesis 5 and 11, why would it be supposed to mimic a kind of royal genealogy among Assyrians which in the end it is not mimicking? Not just Henoch, but also Lamech died before their fathers.

"Creation science, on the other hand, does make a mockery of the reliability of Scriptures by proclaiming that all the false young-earth claims about the scientific evidence are biblical, rather than being honest and admitting that the scientific data favor other interpretations of Genesis."

I don't know any Creation scientist who is pretending that Kent Hovind's theory of Flood mechanics or mine of Carbon 14 build up after the Flood is revealed divine truth. We would each obviously say it is at once compatible with scientific and with textual Biblical evidence. You are strawmanning the opposing position, because a flaw in your own, on the Biblical side, is being called out.

"We need to seek to understand what Moses meant when he wrote, and thus should do our best to understand how ancient Near Eastern people would have understoood the words, rather than imposing a modern historical-scientific interpretation on a text written long before that style of writing was developed."

1) Israelites are not just any Ancient Near East people.
2) Archibald Sayce may well have misunderstood Assyrian royal genealogies.
3) It is very possible that he never meant the stretching to go beyond a human history of c. 10 000 years.
4) History (and for that matter science) are not inventions of the modern world.
5) When we speak of genealogies, we speak of history, it has changed far less than sciences in modern times.
6) If I suggested Genesis 5 and 11 were recorded direct history, I would not be welcome at the Historical Institution in Lund University. But if YOU came out with the idea that Assyrian type genealogies could account for stretching 3000 years into 746,000 years, you'd be laughed out even quicker and much louder. You have NO clue about history. You have one eye at science, one at theology, you mistreat both, and history is somewhere behind your back where you are definitely not even looking.
7) If scientific style of writing wasn't developed until c. 1600~1700 AD, what shall we do of a Medieval recipe recommending cloves against toothache? As it turns out cloves do involve a molecule that kills caries bacteria.
8) In sum, you subscribe to the latest (or second latest or third latest or whatever) change in how scientific and historic matters are expressed, and dismiss all previous ways of expressing them as NOT expressing them, which is wildly supercilious against our ancestors.

"Again, the internal evidence in the Bible shows that genealogies often skip over people. Matthew selected certain individuals to give particular numbers of generations, despite having a more extensive list of the generations in Kings and Chronicles; likewise, he has rather fewer generations between the exile and Jesus than Luke does, suggesting some were skipped over there."

Very few. And Exile to Jesus, Luke and Matthew don't have the exact same lineage. I'd say Matthew is biologically patrilinear up to Joseph, and adoptive between Joseph and Jesus, of course. At earlier levels, Luke will, when getting to a name mentioned in Matthew (like Joseph) involve an adoptive or inlaw sonship or fatherhood. This means, the Exile to Jesus part is no indication of skipped generations.

Kings of Judah, three generations were omitted by damnatio memoriae, as well as having a a purpose in omitting them, Matthew had a ritual reason to omit son, grandson and greatgrandson of Athaliah (a fourth disreputable woman, and one not even mentioned in Matthew). One more close to exile, unless Damien Mackey is right he's included under an alias.

"The drastic difference in the number of generations listed for Joshua versus Moses"

Let's see, I suppose you mean Moses was very close to Jacob?

Jacob, Levi, Caath, Amram, Moses (Exodus 6)
Jacob, Joseph, Ephraim, Beria, Thale, Thaan, Laadan, Ammiud, Elisama (a woman?), Nun, Josue (I Paralipomenon 7).

Let's put it like this. I was born in 1968. How many generations back is an ancestor born in 1800?

Mother born 1947. Her father born 1900. His father c. 1850. His father c. 1800.

Even if you are older than me, I think you have some ancestor born 1800 who's further from you than Petter Lundahl was was from me.

I have heard a similar argument, from the fewness of generations prior to David.

"And Salmon begot Booz of Rahab" (1470~1450 BC, sth, since Rahab was prior to the taking of Jericho not united to any Israelite ... well, up to perhaps some week before or so, at least) I
"And Booz begot Obed of Ruth." II
"And Obed begot Jesse." III
"And Jesse begot David the king." IV (he was anointed in 1032 BC, at the age of 30, so, he was born 1062 BC).

1450 (late date for Booz' birth)- 1062 = 388 years. The medium lifelength at birth of relevant son would be 388 / 3 = 129 years.

Fiction? Not an option to a Christian. Exodus was later? I don't think so, it doesn't square with the archaeology of Jericho (unless carbon dates are even more warped than 1550 BC as per Kenyon being 80 to 120 years too early) or book of Judges. The options are omitted generations, or late paternities. I'm going with late paternities.

So, what you brought up simly means paternities were of unequal age between Jacob and Moses and between Jacob and Josue.

I checked I Paralipomenon 7 in interlinear, seems Elisama was a man.

"Modern young-earth creationism insists that such a chronology is theologically essential, and prioritizes defending a young earth over careful honesty about the evidence. ... But the reality is that Genesis, and the rest of the Bible, is not history in the same sense that a modern history textbook is."

You know, there are ill expressed things in modern history text books as well. Ill expressed in the sense of giving the unwary a wrong impression.

"By putting the traditions of men over the commandment of God, it has become a dangerous legalistic false gospel, rather than a credible Christian option."

I would rather say that a literal and basically literalistic reading of Genesis 5 to 11 is Apostolic Tradition, and therefore a tradition from Christ, from God. I don't care much of what a Protestant will pretend is "legalistic false gospel" (I've seen praying the Rosary described as that, or going on a pilgrimage!) or what a Protestant pretens is "a credible Christian option" (I left the Swedish state Church partly because of the Deformation in the 16th C ... some spell the word with an R ... but got in a hurry over the Lutheran parish applying the "credible Christian option" of "ordaining" women).

"What it says about history is true, but we need to be careful that we are reading it correctly."

Admitting there is a doubt about the II Cainan is careful reading. Admitting there could be an omitted pagan between Salmon and Booz (making birth at relevant sons in medium 97 years) is an option of careful reading. Or even admitting that King David's genealogy from Conquest COULD be going for "who one is connected with" could also be that. But imagining that this sort of expedient could account for compressing 746 000 years into Genesis 5 and 11 is extreme carelessness of reading.

"And its purpose is not to tell us a chronicle of past events for the benefit of historians, but rather to provide examples of God’s dealing with humanity, teaching what we are to believe concerning Him and what duties He requires of us. For example, Joshua tells of the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan and defeats of the Canaanites. But it also has quite extensive discussion of how the people needed to finish the job of conquest and not complacently mingle with the surrounding peoples, absorbing their theological errors."

Does 19th C. US history figure a Gettisburgh adress? Chronicles of past events are not just the benefit of historians, but in one part, the most credible anchoring of pretendedly pre-scientific people's (I hate the term) observations and therefore God's revelation in objective physical humanly observed reality, and on the other hand, high class entertainment (not all of the time, if genealogies bore you). The possible "purely scientific needs" of historians are an injustice to actual historians, and history as we do it now actually is full of programmatic adresses. "Fourscore years and ten, our ancestors ..." "I have a dream ..." "There is no Cheka in Italy ... but there is one in Russia and it has killed at least 40 000 people, already" "a second but better German Country" (Deutschland is Germany, but literally means German Country, I quoted Dollfuss' words about Austria, in defense of Austrian independence, which Hitler was menacing). That the book of Joshua contains one too doesn't mean it doesn't do history as we do! I'll give another one of my historic quotes: "Karl Marx was a talented Jew who saw the problem of Capitalism, but didn't see the solution to it" (I'll make you guess...).

"Thus, when the text states that Joshua and the army wiped out all that breathed, it’s obvious that is hyperbole. Such was customary at the time – Pharoah Merneptah boasted of having exterminated Israel, probably just a few decades later, whe all he actually did was defeat a group of them in battle (and incidentally demonstrating that “Israel” existed as an entity before 1200 BC, no matter what liberal critics claim)."

Hyperboles about battle casualities will not land 746 000 years into Genesis 5 and 11. You have that far later, in the Middle Ages as (possibly) the book of Joshua, in boasting. Béziers was taken, no doubt and many were killed because of the Cathars. Doesn't mean that all of 5000 were physically killed.

"the Bible simply doesn’t tell us a lot that a modern historian would like to know. We need additional information to fill in details. For example, the Hebrew text states that Pharoah Neco was going to Assyria. He was in a hurry and had his army with him, so it’s obvious this was no mere diplomatic visit. Older versions understandably translated that he was going against Assyria. Now we have the Babylonian chronicle, and know that Neco was going to Assyria as an ally to prop it up against Babylon when Josiah sought to meddle in world politics. The Bible does not mention Babylon there; the point was to trace Josiah’s disastrous political move rather than to tell us about the geopolitical situation in the late 7th century BC."

Totally fair game. Deep Time pseudo-science is however not a match for the Babylonian chronicle.

"Population genetics enables calculation of the approximate population size in the past needed to produce the observed current genetic diversity."

1) No, they don't. Pitcairners have an ancestry that at one time was reduced to 20-odd people.
2) That back-calculation doesn't account for rapid diversifications after the Flood (continued after Babel) with both Founder Effect and more mutations than now (due to the same more radioactive radiation that made for a more rapid buildup of Carbon 14 and for much colder weather than the Little Ice age.

"The young-earth claims that the genetic diversity could derive from just Adam and Eve about six thousand years ago are simply not honest (like the foolish claims that “genetic entropy” points to a recent origin of humanity)."

I think you are as amateur in genetics as I am, if not more. You are a palaeontologist, not a geneticist. You are making a heavy charge against Robert Carter and Nathaniel Jeanson, here.

"Likewise, genetic data show that many modern humans have a little DNA derived from Neanderthal, Denisovian, or other prehistoric groups who were more different from the main human ancestry lineage. Were those others fully human in a spiritual sense, or merely physically similar? We don’t really know."

We do, they were spiritual, they did descend from Adam and Eve, and perhaps from fallen angels (depending on how you read Genesis 6:2, 6:4). I think Robert Carter is in a total conundrum, and needs to totally omit detailed consideration of the carbon dates, to put them post-Babel. To put them pre-Flood, especially with a pre-Flood period of 2242~2262 years, is less challenging. I don't think Neanderthals were pure Nephelim, Denisovans / Antecessors / Heidelbergians is one candidate, and if so, Homo erectus soloensis is the result of some kind of "orc breeding" (they were victims and tools of cruel nephelim), or, if Denisovans also were not pure Nephelim, Homo erectus soloensis would be a candidate for them.

Notification given
Thursday 19:04, 3.X.2024 or
Day of St. Thérèse.

Friday 00:08
4.X.2024
Day of St. Francis of Assisi
David C. Campbell
Think. Your arguments are not good. Unless you stop just making up claims and seriously think about the information, there is no point in discussing. Modern young-earth creationism is a dangerous legalistic heresy, substituting belief in a young earth for trust in salvation by the work of Jesus. As Paul warns extensively in Galatians, this is a serious problem. The roots of modern young-earth creationism are in 19th-century movements that assumed that one can ignore the accumulated knowledge of theology over the centuries to rely just on one's personal reading of Scripture. I have work to be doing. You said that there is nowhere with land fossils above ocean fossils; I have given numerous examples, and there are many more (like the ones I collected at the Clark quarry). You keep bringing up new claims without paying attention to the problems in what you have already said, nor are you giving good justification for your assertions. It is perfectly possible for language skills to build over generations. Or God could instill them more rapidly. Simply denying things because they contradict your position is not arguing honestly or well.

Friday 08:40
4.X.2024
Day of St. Francis of Assisi
Vous avez envoyé
"Think."

I think I do so more often than you. You live in a bubble, where YEC is the demonised outsider.

I'm confronting the Deep Timer and Evolutionist as much as I can.

"Your arguments are not good."

For this second round, you have not been in a postion to know.

"Unless you stop just making up claims and seriously think about the information, there is no point in discussing."

You would not know whether I'm "just making up claims" because you don't master the areas that I do.

I never went to the Historic Faculty at Lund, but I certainly studied Latin there and was a long time friend of two from the Historic faculty. The way that they reacted to some things I posted on their wall is both how our friendship ended, and how I know what the Historic Faculty would be thinking. And I am far ahead of you with Sts. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.

You were so damned and damnably eager to just bamboozle me with tidbits from — Dal Prete? — that you never answered my straight questions. You surmised, probably correctly, that detailed quotes would impress me even less than your summaries.

"Modern young-earth creationism is a dangerous legalistic heresy, substituting belief in a young earth for trust in salvation by the work of Jesus."

That's basically what Protestants say about Catholicism. Unless you missed that I am a Catholic.

"As Paul warns extensively in Galatians, this is a serious problem."

A Protestant claiming to comprehend Galatians ... this is seriously funny.

"The roots of modern young-earth creationism are in 19th-century movements that assumed that one can ignore the accumulated knowledge of theology over the centuries to relyjust on one's personal reading of Scripture."

1) You are describing YOUR Deformers like Luther and Calvin "to a T";
2) You are pretending the modernist stance which is knowledgeable about Church Fathers and Scholastics, but doesn't believe what they believe, but instead plays fast and loose with the leeway THEY (as Protestants!) think this affords them is EQUAL to "the accumulated knowledge of theology over the centuries".

You are the person or representative of the group that is pulling claims out of their arses.

I happen to know Roman Catholic 19th C. From Lyell to 1890's, it was vocally divided between YEC, Gap Theory, Day-Age. Nobody was "Framework" (with approval of their bishop and of Rome, at least) prior to 1920.

"I have work to be doing."

Probably as dishonest as you have been here, but fine with me.

"You said that there is nowhere with land fossils above ocean fossils; I have given numerous examples,"

Let's analyse a bit more.

"For example, all of Florida has oceanic rock, with patches of later land deposits, and sometimes back and forth is preserved."

Can you demonstrate the land deposits aren't islands from the Flood?

"The midwestern US has Paleozoic ocean rocks with Pleistocene land faunas."

Midwestern US is a large region, not a place. Can you demonstrate the land faunas are not from post-Flood?

"Much of the classic western North American area for dinosaurs and large land mammals has some alternation of ocean and land deposits, with land deposits above ocean."

You have been shy of how you define "above" ... common sense interpretation or geologic interpretation, where you can walk "up" or "down" because you count the directions of the wharves and laminations?

"The Triassic to Jurassic rift basins along the eastern US have multiple layers of land deposits. Some have younger land and ocean layers alternating above them."

You have given no single locality where a dig hole shows the alternation is really vertical, rather than "vertical by geologic convention" ....

This was a list you gave me. I replied, among other things:

// But I'd appreciate if you dropped "many" and concentrated on one clear example. //

When you did, there was NO clear indication AT ALL that the verticality of layers was (for fossil locations) other than the known geological convention. You know where an "outcrop" counts as "below" the surrounding "younger" layers.

"(like the ones I collected at the Clark quarry)"

The way you described it, it seems you walked from one place to the other. It didn't seem as if you were digging deeper down into the same hole.

"You keep bringing up new claims without paying attention to the problems in what you have already said,"

You are projecting. Any "new claims" I give is systematically in response to your pretended "problems in what I have already said" ... perhaps you are a bit to old to do arguing. You seem bent and even hellbent on lecturing me, and when that doesn't work, you pretend I'm a lousy pupil of yours, when I came out very clearly as a debater.

"nor are you giving good justification for your assertions."

Since Wednesday 25 of September, it has been outside your expertise, so individually as a palaeontologist, you are not in a position to know. Perhaps you think you know it collectively with your Church. As a Catholic, I pretty much despise your Church, both for Old Earth Compromise, and for outrageous and blasphemoous views of what "image of God" means, and for simply being heirs of the Deformation in the 16th C. What the likes of YOU think of as "good justification" is frankly irrelevant.

"It is perfectly possible for language skills to build over generations."

No. Not from bestial to human. If you mean from Barbarian to Civilised, that's a whole different story, that's within human. Bestial sound communications have 1 sound (with its specific tone and repetition) = 1 complete message. That complete message is not notional. Ever. Human sound communications are 1 sound only part of a morpheme, 1 morpheme only part of a phrase (and languages differ on how many morphemes bundle together into words with unified morpheme sequence and how many morphemes are more or less free in relation to each other) and only the phrase is giving a complete, often notional, message. This is because the majority of morphemes, way more numerous than what beasts have in their sound repertoir or even overall communication repertoir are most often non-practical or not-immediately-practical precisely notions. This is NOT the kind of thing that "language evolution" of any kind (whether from Latin to Old French, or the kind of change that popularisation of learning brings) can provide "over many generations" ... as I am a Latinist and my Latin Professor was an admirer of Chomsky, I think I'm the one who is in a position to give lectures to you ... or to someone younger than you who will take them, as you probably won't.

"Or God could instill them more rapidly."

Into what? God could instill them very rapidly into an ape (by also rapidly, against all laws of biology changing the anatomy and genes in one go). God could also instill them rapidly into sth He had just created from scrapings of the soil. Why would the latter seem more compatible with His goodness? Because it doesn't involve any trauma of separation or estrangement from one's own past.

"Simply denying things because they contradict your position is not arguing honestly or well."

I wasn't, you are the one constantly doing so. For instance about human language not evolving.


In the company of Protestant Old Earthers who try to treat me, a Catholic Young Earth Creationist, I kind of feel like an oppressed East German in 1989 (or ... earlier?), watching this video:

34 Years of German Reunification | Feli from Germany
Feli from Germany | 4 Oct. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJp0OK5FGjM


PS, Our Lady of the Rosary, 4 days later, I find another and parallel answer about the argument of "Population genetics enables calculation of the approximate population size in the past needed to produce the observed current genetic diversity.", namely here:

DNA from the last woolly mammoths
by Robert Carter, 8.X.2024
https://creation.com/dna-from-the-last-woolly-mammoths


Not that I think my argument from Pitcairners was too weak, but parallel support from other facts is obviously welcome, it's called corroborating evidence./HGL

Wednesday 25 September 2024

Avec Monseigneur Pierre d'Ornellas


I

De Hans-Georg Lundahl
à l'Archidiocèse de Rennes, Dol et Saint-Malo
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 8:47 PM
Bonjour ... vous croyez qu'Adam et Ève ont réellement existé ...
... et que leur histoire a pu atteindre Moïse ou Abraham par tradition orale sans d'être déformée ?

Je cite le Père George Leo Haydock:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. (Haydock)


GENESIS - Chapter 3
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859 edition.
https://johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock/id329.html


Il vécut avant Darwin :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Leo_Haydock

Quelle solution proposez-vous, si entre ceci et par exemple des chasseurs-cueilleurs de l'Ouest arrivés en France vers 8000 av. J. Chr. ou avant il semble y avoir une contradiction assez nette ?

Évidemment, les chasseurs-cueilleurs de l'Ouest ne sont qu'une partie de l'humanité, ils en font vraiment partie, puisque leur génome existe de manièré résiduelle de nos jours (un peu davantage chez les Basques), ils ne sont pas la totalité, puisque les héritages des prémiers agriculteur européens (le plus pur chez les Sardaignes) et des habitants des steppes pontiques en sont distincts. Comme pas mal d'autres. Comme les Néanderthaliens, dont nous avons aussi un héritage résiduel, et dont le dernier trouvé à date est daté à il y a 42 000 ans.

Adam ne peut pas à la fois se trouver 45 000 ans (au minimum) et juste 2--3000 ans (Genèse 5 et 11, voir Haydock cité pour la version Vulgate, la version des LXX n'est pas radicalement différente) avant Abraham.

Hans Georg Lundahl


[Juste au cas qu'il ne répond pas, il y a une solution, mais elle est mal vue par son hiérarchie, c'est le créationnisme jeune terre.]

[Presque une semaine après la missive, deux jours avant la publication, encore pas de mail de Mgr. d'Ornellas.]

Friday 20 September 2024

Continuing debate with David C. Campbell on YEC, OE, Palaeontology


HGL's F.B. writings: Debate on Geology · Creation vs. Evolution: 4.5 Billion Years Worth of Nuclear Decay, Before the End of Day Three? · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Continuing debate with David C. Campbell on YEC, OE, Palaeontology · Continued Debate with David C. Campbell

FB mail exchange with David C. Campbell

Friday 22:20,
6.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
Good day!

Are you a palaeontologist?

If so, one Jeffrey (presumably Greenberg sent me to you:

Debate on Geology
https://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2024/09/debate-on-geology.html


LD 20:47,
8.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
Yes, I am a paleontologist. My research emphasizes mollusks, with most experience in the southeastern US. However, having worked in museums and done plenty of reading, I am familiar with global paleontology. As with all other areas of geology, paleontology clearly contradicts the claims of modern young-earth creationism.

Monday 21:30,
9.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
OK.

One YEC which I don't know how Palaeontology is supposed to contradict, is this.

During the Flood, most bigger fossils that are recognisable (like a T Rex or a Procynosuchus delaharpeae looking like a T Rex or a Procynosuchus delaharpeae) would have been buried in situ.

This means, land fauna would have been buried on the places that were land in pre-Flood times. As to aquatic fauna, it could be buried above land, if floating into an area during the Flood before getting killed, but they could not be below land fauna, and they could not alternative with land fauna.

Land fauna being on the single land surface could not have several levels of itself, for instance, no Procynosuchus delaharpeae from the Permian straight below a T Rex from the Jurassic.

Exactly where on earth do we find land fauna contradicting this prediction?

Tuesday 15:05
10.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
Land or freshwater and ocean fauna alternate in many parts of the world. Historically, the classic example is the Paris Basin, surveyed by Cuvier and Brongniart in the late 1700's. But most coastal parts of the world have some alternation between land and ocean deposits. For example, all of Florida has oceanic rock, with patches of later land deposits, and sometimes back and forth is preserved. The midwestern US has Paleozoic ocean rocks with Pleistocene land faunas. Much of the classic western North American area for dinosaurs and large land mammals has some alternation of ocean and land deposits, with land deposits above ocean. Occasional land animals wash out into the ocean as well.

Likewise, many areas have multiple layers of land and freshwater faunas, one above another. The Triassic to Jurassic rift basins along the eastern US have multiple layers of land deposits. Some have younger land and ocean layers alternating above them. Many coal deposits have many layers of land and freshwater deposits associated with them. The Badlands area of South Dakota has multiple land layers, as do the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic land deposits in areas famous for dinosaurs in the western US. It is actually extremely common to have marine sedimentary rocks below terrestrial sedimentary rocks.

Thursday 02:31,
12.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
"Many coal deposits have many layers of land and freshwater deposits associated with them."

Could this be because floating log mats are identified as land layers when they became coal?

Obviously, even if coal is floating log mats in the Flood, it won't be just the logs, it will be some other land biota along with it ... or did I misunderstand what you were saying?

But I'd appreciate if you dropped "many" and concentrated on one clear example.

"The Triassic to Jurassic rift basins along the eastern US have multiple layers of land deposits. Some have younger land and ocean layers alternating above them."

Alternating at what angle, and how many of the land layers include actual land vertebrate fauna?

Again, one clear example is more instructive than a broad range of applications to a sweeping statement.

"It is actually extremely common to have marine sedimentary rocks below terrestrial sedimentary rocks."

In how many cases does this involve actual vertebrate fauna in each layer and this at angles, like more vertical than 45° ideally?

Friday 00:14
13.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
No, the floating mat model is not compatible either with flood geology or actual geological evidence. Flood geology implies violently catastrophic flooding which would melt the earth, which is not compatible with floating mats with trees and land animals. Also, coal seams commonly do have roots extanding into the ground under them; although some of the plant material moved around some (such as washing into the ocean), much coal shows ample evidence of being depostied in place.

Vertebrate faunas are present in multiple layers on top of each other in many parts of the world. Classic examples include the Badlands of South Dakota and the Jurassic to early Cenozoic layers of the prime dinosaur-hunting regions of the western US and Canada. In these areas, often they layers are largley flat; however, they are extremely tilted in places such as along the front of the Rockies in central Colorado.

Friday 13:21
13.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
"Flood geology implies violently catastrophic flooding which would melt the earth,"

Alleged consequence =/= obvious implication.

"Also, coal seams commonly do have roots extanding into the ground under them;"

A log mat which was uprooted from original place would probably get some roots into as yet soft mud during the Flood.

"although some of the plant material moved around some (such as washing into the ocean), much coal shows ample evidence of being depostied in place."

How would you know the difference between deposition in place and deposition after floating around as a log mat?

"Vertebrate faunas are present in multiple layers on top of each other in many parts of the world."

Many parts of the world is not one place.

"Classic examples include the Badlands of South Dakota"

What exact place there involves digging down and finding a "later-period" fossil, and digging further down and finding an "earlier-period" fossil? Specifically land vertebrate.

Land non-vertebrates are often small enough to remain intact even if not deposited in situ and aquatic vertebrates we would expect several layers on top of each other, we would expect for instance sharks over trilobites and Mosasaurs or whales over sharks. So, two of more layers of land vertebrates. On top of each other.

"In these areas, often they layers are largley flat;"

I'm specifically looking for flat, non-tilted layers. The lower discovery through further digging.

"however, they are extremely tilted in places such as along the front of the Rockies in central Colorado."

Apart from the fact I wasn't looking for tilted, how would you diagnose layers as tilted in those parts?

Friday 23:41
13.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
The modern creation science movement originated in the mid-1800s, with the misapplication of “Enlightenment” bias to the Bible and claiming that the Bible had to be talking about science to be true. It reflects a misinterpretation of selected verses rather than a thorough effort to understand either Scripture or creation. Throughout the early church and medieval times, various ideas about the age of the earth were discussed in the church. As geologic study began to look at evidence for the age of the earth in the mid-1600’s, it gradually became more and more obvious that immense amounts of time were required to explain what was observed. This was not generally seen as a problem for the Bible. The “history” claimed by atheists and young-earthers is not true.

"Flood geology implies violently catastrophic flooding which would melt the earth," Alleged consequence =/= obvious implication.

In order to have all of the plate tectonic motion recorded in the geological record fitting into a single year, the heat required would melt the earth. The energy required to supply or remove enough water to flood the earth would produce enough heat to melt the earth. Speeding up radiometric decay as advocated in the RATE project would produce enough heat to melt the earth (which they admit but ignore). These are not alleged consequences. But the implications are indeed obvious.

“ "Also, coal seams commonly do have roots extanding into the ground under them;" A log mat which was uprooted from original place would probably get some roots into as yet soft mud during the Flood.

First, you need to have a coherent model for the Flood and demonstrate what would actually happen under those circumstances rather than claiming that it could do anything you want it to. If the continents are zipping around at 45 mph, log mats don’t have a chance. If the flood is calm enough to have a mat, you can’t have all the violent geologic events squeezed into a short period of time. Second, many coal layers have soil layers with extensive evidence of roots under them, not merely the occasional root that could be squashed into them after deposition. Yes, it is possible to tell the difference. You also need to consider whether you are applying the same standard of proof to the young-earth claims as you are to honest biblical old-earth geology.

“Many parts of the world is not one place. “ No, it’s lots of places. And each one has the pattern that you are claiming doesn’t exist.

“"Classic examples include the Badlands of South Dakota" What exact place there involves digging down and finding a "later-period" fossil, and digging further down and finding an "earlier-period" fossil? Specifically land vertebrate. Land non-vertebrates are often small enough to remain intact even if not deposited in situ and aquatic vertebrates we would expect several layers on top of each other, we would expect for instance sharks over trilobites and Mosasaurs or whales over sharks. So, two of more layers of land vertebrates. On top of each other.

Multiple layers of land vertebrates are found throughout the upper western Great Plains regions. On top of each other. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2003/0035/pdf/of03-35.pdf is an overview of the stratigraphy at Badlands National Park. The marine Pierre Shale and Fox Hills Formation (with major changes in the types of fossils found in them as you go up through the layers) are overlain by multiple layers of land and freshwater deposits with many land vertebrates.

Further west (much of eastern Montana, for example), the Judith River Formation, a famous dinosaur-bearing layer, is under the Bearpaw marine deposit, followed by more dinosaurs in the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation.

“"In these areas, often they layers are largley flat;" I'm specifically looking for flat, non-tilted layers. The lower discovery through further digging. "however, they are extremely tilted in places such as along the front of the Rockies in central Colorado." Apart from the fact I wasn't looking for tilted, how would you diagnose layers as tilted in those parts?

You mentioned tilted in your previous post. Given that dinosaurs did not simply walk up a steep muddy slope, the tilting of the layers is quite apparent at Dinosaur Ridge (https://dinoridge.org/visit-dinosaur-ridge/dinosaur-ridge-trail/ ). Also, the ridge has Jurassic land vertebrate layers overlain by Cretaceous land layers with the trackways.

Saturday 14:24
Feast of Holy Cross
14.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
History of ideas is closer to my field than to yours.

"The modern creation science movement originated in the mid-1800s, with the misapplication of “Enlightenment” bias to the Bible and claiming that the Bible had to be talking about science to be true."

In fact, no such thing.

"It reflects a misinterpretation of selected verses rather than a thorough effort to understand either Scripture or creation. Throughout the early church and medieval times, various ideas about the age of the earth were discussed in the church."

Yes, whether LXX or Vulgate was the better key to Genesis 5 and 11. Whether the creation days were 168 hours or just one (nano-)second, possibly followed by gestation time. How to count the years in between Exodus and Temple. How many years did the kingdom of Judah last. Did Jesus come in Daniel's 63rd of 61st week. How long after the captivity was the start of the weeks. But NOT wether the days could be longer periods, that's a misreading for them corresponding to longer periods after Adam sinned (and yes, Jesus came and remade man in the sixth of these).

"As geologic study began to look at evidence for the age of the earth in the mid-1600’s, it gradually became more and more obvious that immense amounts of time were required to explain what was observed."

Steno was a Flood geologist. James Hutton was a Deist, and he wrote on Siccar point in 1788.

"This was not generally seen as a problem for the Bible. The “history” claimed by atheists and young-earthers is not true."

About Protestantism. All through the 19th C. from Lyell to the 1890's, we Catholics defended Young Earth Creationism (as the traditional doctrine), Day-Age AND Gap Theories. All pious Catholics agreed that the history of man at least was the Biblical history from Adam on, that Abraham lived some time between 2000 to 3000 + (perhaps a bit beyond that, but not by too much) after Creation of man. Carbon dating now puts this in conflict with any Old Earth theory, but in a YEC setting, with atmosphere being young, this is still feasible.

I do not have this history from Atheists or from YEC but from the article Hexaëmeron by the Jesuit Mangenot in 1920, in Paris, he rejected all three and introduced sth very close to Framework Hypothesis.

"In order to have all of the plate tectonic motion recorded in the geological record fitting into a single year, the heat required would melt the earth."

I suppose you mean things like motion from Pangaea and Gondwana? Because I'd dispute that this was the actual configuration of continents prior to the Flood. I would also dispute that the tectonic motion ceased just after the Flood, I would on the contrary say significant motion continued up to Babel times (350 to 401 after the Flood).

Plus, the plates would anyway be gliding over molten magma. Hence my underlining that the consequence is alleged.

"Speeding up radiometric decay as advocated in the RATE project would produce enough heat to melt the earth (which they admit but ignore)."

Not if it was limited to certain quantities of Uranium. And even then I'd extend the "quicker process" far beyond the single year.

"an overview of the stratigraphy at Badlands National Park."

Can't open it in this library.

"the Judith River Formation, a famous dinosaur-bearing layer, is under the Bearpaw marine deposit, followed by more dinosaurs in the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation."

I know enough about Hell Creek to know that a Formation is not a place, nor is it restricted to a place.

"You mentioned tilted in your previous post."

I think you misunderstood sth else.

// In how many cases does this involve actual vertebrate fauna in each layer and this at angles, like more vertical than 45° ideally? //

I didn't mean the verticality within a single layer (which if so would be very tilted). I meant verticality between the layers, so as to exclude that the "different layers" are biotopes side by side. I mean, if you dig down one metre and find a Stegosaur, and then you find a Dimetrodon ten metres below the Stegosaur, I would like the Dimetrodon to be straight under the Stegosaur, not further away from the vertical line than ten metres.

"Also, the ridge has Jurassic land vertebrate layers overlain by Cretaceous land layers with the trackways."

Are the Cretaceous layers also involving land vertebrates? Or does "trackways" just mean footprints?

Monday 23:34
16.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
Not just the difference between the LXX and Masoretic. Many Christians advocated the idea that creation was eternal, yet created; they thought that God as Creator needed a corresponding creation. Others thought that the time of creation was a finite, but vast, time back into the past, with no clear evidence of the date. Others thought that the time since the days of Genesis 1 through 2:3 was fairly completely accounted for in Scripture, but within that there were some who thought that the chaos of Genesis 1:2 might have lasted for a noticeable amount of time before the 7 days and some who did not. The Fourth Lateran Council rejected the idea of a co-eternal creation, though that did not prevent people from continuing to talk about the idea, but the other options remained within the range of western orthodoxy. Ivano Dal Prete’s On the Edge of Eternity. The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 2022 goes into detail with many examples of ancient earth ideas in pre-modern Europe.

Steno did not hold to modern Flood Geology. But he did not follow up beyond his initial publications. A wide range of workers studied geology in the late 1600’s through the later 1700’s, building on Steno’s (and others’) ideas. For example, one priest noted that the lava flow from the roughly 200-year old flow on Mount Etna still looked pretty fresh. But digging for a well found a series of seven layers where a lava flow had covered soil that had weathered from an older flow. He guessed that each of those must have taken at least a couple thousand years. And the volcano is on top of some rather young geologic layers. Another priest objected to this suggestion. The papal authorities investigated, found that the old-earther was right, and formally suppressed the claims of the young-earther in the latest 1700’s.

Carbon dating supports a biblical timeline. Before Abraham, there is not enough detail to definitely say that particular archaeological remains match with particular parts of the Bible. But Abraham’s world is recognizably early second millennium BC in the Near East. Carbon dating confirms that somebody burned down impressive buildings in the late 900’s BC – Pharoah Shishak raiding Rehoboam and Jeroboam (and bragging about it in hieroglyphics), that Hezekiah’s tunnel was built in Hezekiah’s time, etc. While demonstrating that certain young-earth claims about changing decay rates are untrue, this doesn’t say much else about age of the earth before Abraham.

“Because I'd dispute that this was the actual configuration of continents prior to the Flood. I would also dispute that the tectonic motion ceased just after the Flood, I would on the contrary say significant motion continued up to Babel times (350 to 401 after the Flood).”

The evidence of past plate motion is based on a wide range of evidence, with a series of multiple supercontinents; Pangea being the most recent. No, moving continents on magma does not speed them up enough to make a young-earth view possible. Besides, cooling that magma in a few thousand years doesn’t work. You do not have any valid geological reason to dispute that was the configuration of the continents; you are simply rejecting it because it conflicts with young-earth claims. You need to critically examine all the evidence. Basic laws of thermodynamics, the ones that young-earthers like to claim pose challenges for evolution, are what tell us that creation science models would melt the earth. Dismissing all the evidence as alleged does not make it sound like you are seriously considering it.

"Speeding up radiometric decay as advocated in the RATE project would produce enough heat to melt the earth (which they admit but ignore)." Not if it was limited to certain quantities of Uranium. And even then I'd extend the "quicker process" far beyond the single year.

Speeding up radiometric decay alters very basic laws of physics. Atoms can’t exist if you change the laws. You can’t just play around with the numbers because you want them to fit a young earth; you have to seriously examine what the actual consequences would be. There’s more thorium than uranium around, as well as plenty of potassium-40 and hundreds of other radioactive isotopes. All of the isotopes that last long enough to give any information about the age of the earth point to ages older than is compatible with young-earth claims.

“I know enough about Hell Creek to know that a Formation is not a place, nor is it restricted to a place.” No, it is found in lots of places. Where the next layer down, the Bearpaw, is also exposed, the one underneath is marine and the Hell Creek has land fauna. That’s what you said shouldn’t exist in a flood model. You need to recognize that the geologic record does clearly show land deposits on top of ocean deposits and different land deposits on top of other land deposits, and either come up with a revised flood model or admit that you don’t currently have a good model. How could your flood produce layers with totally different marine life, one layer after another? You need to develop specific models, see if they work, and make corrections.

Right at Dinosaur Ridge, the Stegosaurus bones and other Jurassic fossils (including some footprints) are under a layer with Cretaceous footprints. Elsewhere you can find Cretaceous bones in the layers above the Jurassic bones, but I don’t know if there are Cretaceous bones right at Dinosaur Ridge.

Tuesday 15:28
17.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
I have not read the book by Ivano Dal

"Many Christians advocated the idea that creation was eternal, yet created; they thought that God as Creator needed a corresponding creation."

Wait, are we talking Christians in general or Christians of the type considered authoritative by Catholics as in Church Fathers, Doctors and at least saints?

Averroism was condemned by Tempier as much as it was refuted by St. Thomas.

"Others thought that the time of creation was a finite, but vast, time back into the past, with no clear evidence of the date."

I've heard a rumour Jerome thought this about spiritual creatures, but have no trace of this applying to material creation.

"Others thought that the time since the days of Genesis 1 through 2:3 was fairly completely accounted for in Scripture, but within that there were some who thought that the chaos of Genesis 1:2 might have lasted for a noticeable amount of time before the 7 days and some who did not."

From modern Geology this is the position of one school in three. Cardinal Wiseman.

"The Fourth Lateran Council rejected the idea of a co-eternal creation, though that did not prevent people from continuing to talk about the idea, but the other options remained within the range of western orthodoxy."

I defy you to prove Gap Theory so ... if you have the book, you'll know what authors he spoke of.

"Steno did not hold to modern Flood Geology. But he did not follow up beyond his initial publications."

He had other fish to fry, getting Lutherans of Northern Europe back into the Catholic Church and dying from hardships on the road.

"A wide range of workers studied geology in the late 1600’s through the later 1700’s, building on Steno’s (and others’) ideas. For example, one priest noted that the lava flow from the roughly 200-year old flow on Mount Etna still looked pretty fresh. But digging for a well found a series of seven layers where a lava flow had covered soil that had weathered from an older flow. He guessed that each of those must have taken at least a couple thousand years. And the volcano is on top of some rather young geologic layers. Another priest objected to this suggestion. The papal authorities investigated, found that the old-earther was right, and formally suppressed the claims of the young-earther in the latest 1700’s."

Names would be helpful. Late 1700's?

"Carbon dating supports a biblical timeline. Before Abraham, there is not enough detail to definitely say that particular archaeological remains match with particular parts of the Bible. But Abraham’s world is recognizably early second millennium BC in the Near East."

Genesis 14 is recognisably carbon dated to 3500 BC.

The fact that Abraham's pharao was willing to even talk of Abraham's God suggests that he was a very early one, well before Pharaos and Khemetic priests became a very well oiled team overall (with some subteams competing).

"Carbon dating confirms that somebody burned down impressive buildings in the late 900’s BC"

I consider carbon dating reached the point of coincidence between real dates and dated dates at around the Trojan War, 1180 BC.

"The evidence of past plate motion is based on a wide range of evidence, with a series of multiple supercontinents; Pangea being the most recent."

Your sentence conflates evidence and explanation. These are opposite ends of the spectrum.

"No, moving continents on magma does not speed them up enough to make a young-earth view possible."

I have your word for it ... no calculation, however.

1) Moving on magma
2) Moving far less.

I have not seen calculations showing the problem persists.

"Besides, cooling that magma in a few thousand years doesn’t work."

I don't think you followed my proposal at all. I'm far from saying it has cooled.

"You do not have any valid geological reason to dispute that was the configuration of the continents; you are simply rejecting it because it conflicts with young-earth claims."

Or those of Bible and Tradition .... somewhat weightier than I.

"critically examine all the evidence. Basic laws ... would melt the earth ... all the evidence"

Extremely big talk. Exactly zero calculations, even such I'd find hard to follow.

"does not make it sound like you are seriously considering it."

I reserve my right to consider things flippantly, if it suits me. Especially if you are flippant enough to claim calculations you refuse to show.

"Speeding up radiometric decay alters very basic laws of physics. Atoms can’t exist if you change the laws."

I think there are quite a few known factors that can speed up decay without altering the laws of physics.

"you have to seriously examine what the actual consequences would be."

I did that with carbon 14 after hearing that kind of big claims about a speeded carbon 14 production nuke frying vertebrate life. In the end it was the Evolution side that gave up:

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : Other Check on Carbon Buildup
Thursday 23 November 2017, Posted by Hans Georg Lundahl at 09:23
https://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2017/11/other-check-on-carbon-buildup.html


"There’s more thorium than uranium around,"

Thorium - Lead does perhaps not need Speeded up decay, could be the Lead that was there to start with (no Thorium in Zircons)

"as well as plenty of potassium-40 and hundreds of other radioactive isotopes."

How much of the argon in potassium argon dating has been verified as argon 40? I consider argon trapped from the air to be a clear option.

"All of the isotopes that last long enough to give any information about the age of the earth point to ages older than is compatible with young-earth claims."

I consider genealogies better suited than isotopes to tell us the age of the Earth, like Genesis 5 and 11.

You have not offered a total amount of what is there and what was there before decay, I think it's hard to pinpoint one.

"Where the next layer down, the Bearpaw, is also exposed, the one underneath is marine and the Hell Creek has land fauna. That’s what you said shouldn’t exist in a flood model."

I am not speaking of layers in lots of places. I am speaking of lots of layers in a place, each with palaeofauna. What location do you find Hell Creek on top, dig further down and find Bearpaw?

If it's just a matter of walking, we could be tracing a pre-Flood coastline.

"How could your flood produce layers with totally different marine life, one layer after another?"

For Grand Canyon, I already have a model. Invertebrates were swept about in diverse parts of the Flood and from diverse sources that then deposited on top of each other.

"Right at Dinosaur Ridge, the Stegosaurus bones and other Jurassic fossils (including some footprints) are under a layer with Cretaceous footprints."

I'll take the words at max value. One surge of the Flood buried the Stegosaur. Then in shallow waters a Cretaceous creature tried wading on top of the mud ...

"Elsewhere you can find Cretaceous bones in the layers above the Jurassic bones, but I don’t know if there are Cretaceous bones right at Dinosaur Ridge."

Where would be helpful.

One more:

"Steno did not hold to modern Flood Geology."

Neither did the author of Gletscher oder Sintflut. A Catholic priest.

Modern Flood Geologists do admit there was an Ice Age.

Wednesday 16:43
18.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
But not honestly. The geologic record indicates mutliple ice ages through geologic time, and multiple advances and retreats of ice during the most recent one. In the YEC ice age, glaciers advanced from Greenland to Kansas and retreated back within a few hundred years. It's ridiculous and not compatible with the geological evidence. Rather, it's merely an effort to keep fooling people even if they've heard of an ice age.

Thursday 03:25
19.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
If I were to say such a thing about Evolutionists, perhaps even AronRa who probably introduced the heat problem, I'd be stamped right away as a conspiracy theorist.

"The geologic record indicates"

You mean the geologic remains are compatible with being interpreted as ...

"In the YEC ice age, glaciers advanced from Greenland to Kansas and retreated back within a few hundred years. It's ridiculous"

Not if there were drastic changes in temperature.

I'd say the weather was cooled by ionising particles results of the same increase in cosmic radiation that also decreased lifespans and that also increased the carbon 14 content. This was at its most intense in the Ice Age, reaching production levels of C-14 20 times as fast as now.

By the Trojan War, 1779 years after the Flood, the pmC was up at 100 for the first time in world history.

"and not compatible with the geological evidence."

Would you mind telling me what geologic evidence clearly shows that Riss and Würm were different periods?

I note that you have (at least for the moment) left superposition of land vertebrate faunas aside ...

Thursday 23:07
19.IX.2024
David C. Campbell
Well, you weren't listening on the superposition of land faunas. There's Triassic land faunas on top of Permian in South Africa, for example. At Tar Heel, NC, there's a layer with Cretaceous land plants and occasional dinosaur material under multiple different marine layers, followed by a layer with land mammal bones. The Triassic basins in central North Carolina have a series of three formations with assorted land vertebrates, one on top of the other.

For the Pleistocene ice ages, there are many places where traces of one ice age is overlain by another, demonstrating that they were separate glacial intervals. Likewise, we have deposits that reflect the up and down of sea level as glaciers melt and grow. This also affects the ratios of 18Oto 16O, which can be traced back and forth through time. The youngest glacial advance has meaningful 14C dates associated with it; the others are all to background. The patterns of glaciers advancing and retreating match the Milankovitch cycles in Earth's orbit, each cycle taking from about 20,000 to 100,000 years. (We can see how fast each is changing today to calculate the cycle lengths).

No, changing temperature fast enough to send glaciers back and forth from Greenland to Kansas and back in 500 years is not reasonable. If you want to be credible, examine your models, rather uncritically accepting anything young-earth and inventing bad excuses to ignore the evidence. An honest young-earth position has to admit to problems.

Friday 06:01
20.IX.2024
Vous avez envoyé
"Well, you weren't listening on the superposition of land faunas."

I totally was. YOU are the one who weren't listening to my actual question.

I specified, I think more than once, that in order for me to admit that X is above Y, I don't ask whether the wharves surrounding X get above the wharves surrounding Y at some horizontal point between X and Y as you walk from X to Y.

In order for me to admit that X is above Y, I want you to dig a whole that get's down to X and a little deeper down gets to Y. The angle in you dig down between the layers should ideally not exceed 45 °.

"There's Triassic land faunas on top of Permian in South Africa, for example."

No, there ain't no such thing. I actually CHECKED.

"At Tar Heel, NC, there's a layer with Cretaceous land plants and occasional dinosaur material under multiple different marine layers, followed by a layer with land mammal bones."

In that case, the land mammal bones could be a post-Flood layer. The marine layers flooded the land plants and dino material before getting buried in mud themselves.

It could also be it was marine in pre-Flood times if the dino material is very fragmentary.

"For the Pleistocene ice ages, there are many places where traces of one ice age is overlain by another, demonstrating that they were separate glacial intervals."

1) How would that be diagnosed in the terrain?
2) How would you tell the difference between a progression, regression and reprogression of an ice cap at millions and at decades of a distance? The one radio-method that actually is relatively giving dates the right order is lacking for all except the last ice age, and the non-carbon methods one could use for Riss are totally moot.

"The youngest glacial advance has meaningful [C-14] C dates associated with it; the others are all to background."

Well, that would be the post-Flood ice age. In my view, between 2957 BC and 2607 BC when the Younger Dryas ended. The carbon dates would be 39,000 BP respectively 9500 BC

"(We can see how fast each is changing today to calculate the cycle lengths)."

Except this is what one would call an extrapolation from the present and into a non-extant past. The Milankovich point that you associate with the Last Ice Age would be before Creation, and the real reason is something else.

"No, changing temperature fast enough to send glaciers back and forth from Greenland to Kansas and back in 500 years is not reasonable."

In 350 years on my view.

When the production of C-14 was 20 times faster than today how much would that change temperatures due to ionising particles?

During the Little Ice Age (c. 1300 to 1800 AD), C-14 production was faster than today, and that only so much that raw carbon dates are about a century off.

"If you want to be credible, examine your models, rather uncritically accepting anything young-earth"

If you imagine I'm "uncritically accepting" and "not examining" the models proposed by the big YEC organisations, you are deluded. If you had said this face to face to me, I'd probably have hit you in the face and called you "gubbfan" in Swedish. You are an old man, possibly attained by sclerosis or very early Alzheimer since you UNCRITICALLY take over this view of me from other men YOUR generation. When I was a child, I could reasonably expect that once I was 20, I'd be treated as an adult. Today, I'm treated as an immature teen when I am 56, by people who are probably above 70, maybe 80, and enjoy the power of infantilising others that their social leverage can give them. Why didn't you make a quiverfull instead of trying to treat other people's sons like your own?

What the likes of YOU find credible is without relevance to me. YOU are not credible about South Africa. Did you really miss my link in response to Jeff Greenberg about my correspondence with South Africa?

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : Contacting Karoo about superposition of layers and fossils
https://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2015/06/contacting-karoo-about-superposition-of.html


If you wish to mentor people, do so with people who are still immature enough to want a mentor and also gullible enough to trust you.

"and inventing bad excuses to ignore the evidence."

I'm not ignoring any evidence. I simply not subscribing to your conclusions about it. Often enough presented without your offering even a small resumé about what the evidence (the factors in the ground, for instance) is.

"An honest young-earth position has to admit to problems."

Admitting to problems and admitting I have sinned have one thing in common. The problems for YEC as I see them, and the sins I have committed as I see them, may not be the problems you wish to present me, and not be the sins some Evangelicals would credit me with.


I sent him a link to this, somewhat belatedly, he responded, not sure if one should say "graciously" given I had expressed a desire to punch him, or very ungraciously, given he continues the provication. Upcoming on 3.X, day of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.