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 · Mr. Campbell is Back · Mr. Campbell. Can you guess? Is. Back.
- Epiphany
- 6.I.2025
- 03:35
- David C. Campbell
- What is a biblical approach to science? To answer that, we must define what “biblical” and “science” are. People claim that lots of things are biblical. Some things are specifically taught or commanded in the Bible. Other things, though not in the Bible, are compatible with it. Distinguishing between required and permitted is important. Yet other “biblical” claims reflect someone’s use of a phrase or passage as a jumping off point for their ideas. In that setting, “biblical” becomes a way to criticize other views and avoid examination of one’s own position. How can we examine whether our ideas are truly biblical, rather than something that I am reading into the text? One critical component is checking my interpretation against the understandings reached by other people in the Church through history. None of us is inerrant in our interpreting. People in other times and cultures are likely to have different biases and blind spots from us, and so provide a useful check on our views.
The Bible gives plenty of guidelines for how we should behave no matter what we are doing, such as in the ten commandments. Whatever we do, we should do “as unto the Lord”. We should love our neighbors, we should not ignore the logs in our own eyes, etc. Obviously, those apply to doing science. Defining science as knowledge about the physical workings of creation and treating it as a distinct category of knowledge developed in the 1800’s, so “science” in the modern sense was not yet a recognized concept in biblical times. (The references in the KJV in Daniel 1:4 and I Timothy 6:20 to “science” are in its pre-1800’s meaning of “knowledge”, much broader than the modern English meaning of “science”.) But the Bible does tell us that all things are created by and guided by God. Thus, we should expect the universe to behave in regular ways – science is possible. Humans have unique responsibilities for stewardship of creation. To be competent stewards, we need to be able to anticipate the effects of our actions. Therefore, we need to understand science to fulfill our calling to rule the earth well. Likewise, science is often useful in helping our neighbors. Thus, science is a worthwhile endeavor for Christians.
God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. Humans are finite, fallible, and fallen. Therefore, we cannot simply sit back and philosophize out how things should work. Our science, like our theology, must be tested against the evidence and changed where it doesn’t match up. God’s laws work, whether we acknowledge Him or not; unbelievers can make valid observations, even though they are not rightly seeking to glorify God through learning about creation and through improving our understanding of His works. This contrasts with classic Greek ideal of developing a grand philosophy by their own reasoning. The popularity of some philosophies led the medieval church to re-emphasize God’s sovereignty and our need to rely on the evidence, rather than on our ideas of how the world ought to work. This is part of the idea of the promise of the “meek” inheriting the earth – the Greek word praus implies one who wisely accepts the way things are. This emphasis on the theological need to conform to the data, along with the practical benefits of gaining a better understanding of the world, promoted the development of what would become modern science.
One area of the moral law that is also especially critical for science is honesty. Unless findings about the world are accurately reported, we can’t build on them to form our overall understanding of the working of creation. Being honest requires having consistent, fair standards. We must not use less rigor in testing our own ideas than those of others. Job warns his friends against any partiality, even partiality supposedly in favor of God (13:8-10). Likewise, our task as Christians is to be faithful witnesses for God. Paul speaks of the danger of being a false witness for God (I Cor. 15:15). We must not view ourselves as PR agents, bending the truth to enhance appearances. Ultimately, failures in honesty come from the father of lies. If our goal is to win arguments rather than to honor God, we fall into the trap of thinking that the end justifies the means. Failing to carefully examine our own arguments may enhance marketing in the short term, but ultimately it damages our cause by bringing discredit on it.
The modern creation science movement does not represent “the” traditional view of the Church. The Church has always had a range of views on the age of the earth; there is not a single traditional view. And all modern views reflect the developments in society over the past few centuries; none are identical to views of the past. As dal Prete (On the Edge of Eternity) has shown, the claim that the church uniformly believed in a young earth until secular geologists came along is an Enlightenment slander aimed at discrediting the church. In reality, Christians have had various ideas about the age of the earth since the early church, including many believing that it was very ancient. Ussher was one of many scholars in the 1500’s and 1600’s who tried to assemble all of the available data to create a history of the earth. It was a good academic effort for the day, but out of date by the late 1600’s, as new data came in. Although a general acquaintance with rocks and layers was standard for workers such as miners and well-diggers, the academic effort to use geological evidence in building an understanding of earth history began in the late 1600’s. By 1700, many suspected that the earth was very old. By the 1770’s, study of geology (mostly by Christians) had conclusively found evidence for great age, though no one had a good way to figure out the exact number of years until much later. The consensus was that the Bible had simply skipped over a bunch of theologically unimportant pre-human time. For example, the first book to publish a series of illustrations representing different times in the geologic past concluded with a depiction of Eden. Indeed, the geologic record was perceived as supporting the Bible against popular deistic notions by showing a specific sequence of changing life and conditions, pointing back towards a beginning, rather than the deistic idea of infinite cycles with humans continuing indefinitely into the past. By the 1840’s, young earth views seemed a thing of the past. A heterodox movement, however, led to its revival. Although William Miller converted from then-fashionable Enlightenment deism to Christianity, he retained the Enlightenment attitude of relying on personal reason rather than the collective wisdom of the church through the ages. His “I can interpret the Bible all by myself” movement was very popular in the 1830’s, but he used his interpretation to predict the second coming in the early 1840’s. The “Great Disappointment” from the failure of these predictions led his followers to drop out, return to more conventional church bodies, or make up their own versions. Among the latter, Ellen White claimed that the earth was young as part of her origination of Seventh-Day Adventism. Her ideas on creation probably reflect taking Milton’s Paradise Lost too literally. George McCready Price, a SDA member who had taken a couple of science classes, decided to make scientific arguments for a young earth based on his “common sense”, unconstrained by concerns about historical or scientific accuracy, publishing extensively beginning in 1906. Whitcomb and Morris took Price’s claims, removed the Adventist assertions and Price’s name, and successfully sold creation science to the evangelical church with the 1960 publication of The Genesis Flood. Since then, young-earth creationism has boomed in conservative Christian circles, as well as in some Islamic, Jewish, and cult groups. Some of the bad science arguments, though not the young-earth component, have also been taken up by Hare Krishnas. Thus, young-earth creationism is neither essential for Christianity nor essentially Christian, working with varied religions and even some basically atheistic ideas like Raelianism.
What about miracles? Not everything follows the patterns identified by science, do not leave God out of your consideration. But the Bible and everyday experience show that miracles are exceptional; otherwise, we cannot recognize them as significant. Miracles have a specific purpose, to point to God, as shown by their being called “signs”. The Bible and science agree – these are things that do not happen by the everyday patterns of God’s providence that we call natural laws. Indeed, the use of miracles seems to be minimized – Jesus turned the water into wine, which had to be served in the ordinary way; Elisha made the axe head float, but it had to be fastened back on (more securely, I hope); God sent a wind to part the sea but informed Moses ahead of time and had the timing just right, after the feedings of thousands the leftovers were carefully saved, etc. But the function of the countless miracles invoked by creation science and flood geology is to explain away the problems in those claims and why the evidence indicates that a global flood didn’t happen. That does not point to God; it points to a deceiver. The fact that Christians believe that miracles happen does not mean that we should believe that someone has seen Elvis beaming down from a UFO. We should investigate the evidence.
As Genesis 1 assures us, the “laws of nature” are parts of God’s creation. God does not change, so we can rely on His laws to be consistent. Uniformitarianism is what we should expect from the Bible. Of course, people have been too quick to assume that certain limited patterns are universal laws; not all uniformitarian assumptions are correct. But all understanding of the past depends on uniformitarian assumptions. We can’t understand what the Bible says about what happened unless we assume that words have not abruptly changed meaning without anyone noticing. We also have to assume that natural laws applied in biblical times in order to understand what is going on – gravity, chemistry, etc. is not different, people have the same needs and abilities, etc.
By making creation science essential for Christianity, young-earth creationism falls into the error of adding to the gospel, similar to the error of the judaizers that Paul warns against in Galatians. An addition to the gospel becomes a legalistic false gospel. Creation science routinely promotes “testimonies” of “I was an evolutionist but now I’m a creationist because of creation science teaching” – no mention of faith in Christ nor repentance from sin. People are condemned as not being Christian for pointing out problems with young-earth claims, with no effort to assess their relationship to Christ. Likewise, prioritizing young-earth creationism over Christ leads to setting aside God’s commandments in support of creation science tradition (Mark 7:6-13). In particular, the failure to prioritize honesty and good quality of arguments is unacceptable in something that claims to be Christian.
No scientific arguments against an old earth are honest. The evidence from geology, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics plainly supports a vast age for the earth. There are basically two possibilities. Either modern science, though not without errors, is reasonably on the right track as describing the physical workings of creation and creation science is a bunch of incoherent lies, or else modern science is fundamentally incorrect in most of its understanding, the earth really is young, and creation science is a bunch of incoherent lies. The only way that creation science can become a biblical option is to seriously develop specific models, test them against the evidence, admit what doesn’t work, and try to develop something better. But creation science does not seek to improve our understanding of how God’s creation works so that we can become better stewards; it seeks to win arguments. As a result, creation science has never produced any practical results. The geological resources that we use, fuels and minerals, are all found using old-earth models; creation science doesn’t even begin to tell where we should look for resources in the earth.
The evidence from geology is unambiguous. Geological layers record a vast sequence of events that cannot be fit into a young-earth timescale. For example, certain deposits preserve hundreds of thousands of layers that resemble those produced today by seasonal cycles (The Castile Formation’s alternating anhydrite and organic-rich limestone layers is a famous case). Each layer took a certain amount of time to form, even if it wasn’t a full season. And those units with hundreds of thousands of layers take up only a small part of the geological record – all of the layers above and below must be explained as well. (The Castile Formation formed in an enclosed basin with some connection to the ocean; below it are fully marine layers with reefs, and somewhat higher up are terrestrial deposits of the Santa Rosa and Dockum Formations. Land deposits quite commonly overlie marine deposits, which, as you pointed out, does not fit well with flood geology.) The claims that Noah’s flood could explain the geological layers are simply not honest. They do not reflect what actual flood layers look like, nor do they honestly represent geological understanding. Of course, there is no good reason to doubt that Noah’s flood was a real event. But if it matched the description in Genesis, it cannot match the flood of creation science claims. The amount of energy that would be involved to add and remove a global flood’s worth of water would cook Noah. Speeding up plate tectonics to fit within a single year would likewise provide enough heat to boil the oceans away and kill Noah. Speeding up radiometric decay would not only produce fatal levels of radiation but also requires changing the laws of physics that enable molecules to exist – the planet would be destroyed. But Genesis 2 states that the location of Eden was in a place recognizable from landmarks still around after the Flood, which could not happen if the flood resembled modern young-earth imagination. Handwaving claims of “it happened real fast” must not be treated as a good reason to ignore the evidence that it didn’t happen real fast. Likewise, different young-earth claims must be examined for mutual consistency if you are serious about building a credible model and not merely trying to be argumentative.
The most recent ice ages have gone through over 20 cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The exact frequency of temperature and ice volume changes is most thoroughly traced by measuring the patterns in stable isotopes of carbon, oxygen, and other elements downward through layers over time. Although the latest techniques use more complex systems to get more precise results, the principle is easily explained by focusing just on oxygen. Most oxygen is oxygen-16, but some is oxygen-18. Water with oxygen-18 is a little heavier, and so is slower to melt or evaporate and quicker to condense or freeze. If water that evaporates into the air is falling as snow and building a glacier, it’s not returning quickly to the ocean. More 16O water evaporates from the oceans relative to the 18O water, so the ocean gets depleted in 16O as glaciers build and rebounds as glaciers melt. Measuring the relative amount of oxygen-18 thus produces a curve which traces the advance and retreat of glaciers (as well as being affected by other processes involving oxygen). No matter what process you invoke for producing the isotope variations, there has to be enough time for the change in isotopes to mix throughout the ocea worldwide. Currently, that takes about 300 years. “It happened fast” is not a real explanation but merely an excuse to ignore the evidence. A real model will have to give reasons for the changing isotope ratios and how the oxygen gets mixed throughout the ocean quickly enough to produce globally uniform changes, and then test how well all the components of the model fit all of the available evidence.
The different morraines produced by different advances and retreats of glaciers can be distinguished in several ways. Carbon-14 dating will distinguish the very youngest from others. Older morraines are cut by newer glacial activity and the rocks in them are much more weathered than the younger ones. Thermoluminescence dating likewise indicates different ages for different glacial deposits.
A model of glaciation has to account for the survival of organisms through the process. As glaciers advance, not only do animals move south, but the plant populations move also. A tree can’t get up and walk south when a glacier is coming. But we see shifts in where different kinds of plants grow as the glaciers advance and retreat. For forests to move, you have to have many generations of trees growing old enough to produce seeds, which then grow into new trees averaging a little further north or south. That cannot fit into a few hundred year ice age.
The repeated glacial-caused floods from Lake Missoula across the Pacific Northwest region of the US must be accounted for in a realistic model of glaciation. An advancing glacier dammed up a river, producing a huge lake. But ice can melt, and it can float. It’s a terrible choice for making a dam. Eventually, the weight of the lake water caused the glacial dam to fail, and huge floods raced across the region. Without the lake water, the glacier was able to re-block the river, and the cycle began anew.
With lots of water locked into glaciers, that’s less water in the ocean. Sea level dropped as far as 200 meters below modern levels, and then returned to at or above modern as the glaciers melted again. Yet ancient histories such as the Bible give no record of such variations in sea level. During times of higher than modern sea level in the warm intervals between glaciers, coral reefs grew in paces like the Caribbean and tropical Indo-Pacific region. How long did it take each of those reefs to grow? Multiple reefs in places like Barbados have to have grown and then died within the overal period of the ice age. And there are several ice ages shown in much older rocks as well; all of them must be accounted for in an overall history of the earth.
To honestly build a model for the Pleistocene ice ages, it is necessary to take into account all of these, and many more, pieces of evidence about the geological events during them. If the goal is merely to see who can be fooled by making up arguments, then it is not biblical and does not honor God.
- 08:45
- Hans Georg Lundahl
- It seems you are intent on overwhelming me with lots of argument, hoping there is at least something that I cannot answer.
I agree about the need for honesty.
I disagree about nearly everything else, and if you could possibly be honest, that's possibly due to some form of selective memory or initiative of intake about new information.
We have a heavily theological difference to start it all off. You believe all a Christian, whatever level of instruction, needs to believe is "the Gospel". I believe that position to be damnable heresy. For a very poor man without books and little occasions for frequenting a priest or someone who needs to be instructed for five minutes before being baptised before dying there is a sufficiency in six truths. However, for a more instructed man, there is a duty to hold fast to the instructions of the Catholic Church over the ages. Ideally every jot and tittle of the Biblical text as understood by the Church, if and when it has a unified undestanding. You have been trained very little in history, clearly less than I, though my university subjects were always annex and not history itself. But I know for a fact that your description of what people thought over the ages is wrong. In the University of Paris, every student made an oath to uphold a few things, these being the Sentences of Lombardus, the Decree of Gratian, the Historia Scholastica, the latter being a standard work of mainly Biblical history, in a Young Earth Creationist perspective, putting the Birth of God in the Flesh at 5199 after Creation.
- There never was a position making the earth much older than Biblical chronology, there never was a gap theory or a day age theory. The only liberty taken with Genesis 1 chronology is whether the creation days were successive basically 24 hour days (most Church Fathers) or one-moment and simultaneous (St. Augustine, also how some have understood Origen)
- There never was any idea of not using Biblical chronology for the time between Creation and for instance Jesus, there was only a question whether one estimated (Origen's "less than 10 000 years") or counted, and in the latter case what text one used and some interpretative choices (all being in unison about a Short Sojourn)
- Time after time, the Biblical chronology, understood with this kind of leeway and imprecision, was reaffirmed by the fathers, notably against Pagan alternative ideas about the age of the Earth.
You have spoken about "science" and about "Bible" but you have not spoken about history. How do we actually know facts about the past? I would say, because of what people from back then have transmitted to us about those days. In order for a fact to be known with certainty, the recording and the transmission of its words need to be reliable. Before explaining what this has to do with Genesis 5 and 11, I'll introduce the concepts of minimally overlapping generations. If five people are related as father and son, none of them as brother or uncle or anything, and all are alive, the first of the fathers and the last of the sons are "minimally overlapping" in this sense if the son is old enough to check with that first of the fathers before he dies. The father of four living generations and the son of four living generations are both minimally overlapping, in the sense of being alive at the same time, and in the sense that because they are, the generations between can be discounted as "extra steps of transmission" being rather enforcements of the direct transmission from that first of his living direct ancestors. Now, if we take Genesis 5 and 11 as literal and gapfree genealogies, on a Masoretic Chronology reading, Moses will be eigth as Adam is the first, and on a reading like that of Historia Scholastica, Moses will be twelfth. Abraham will be sixth, and considering that the chapters from Genesis 12 on become more prolix, as if written down, it is possible Abraham wrote down the material of Genesis 1 to 11 or 2 to 11 as we have it (chapter 1 could be a vision granted to Moses). This is important for the undestanding that Genesis 3 has been correctly transmitted.
Now, you have a confused general idea about science. I don't say you are confused about how you are doing your particular field, or how it is supposed to (according to your faculty) fit in with the general idea of science, but as your general idea is confused, you are in fact confused about how it actually fits in.
Uniformitarianism does not follow from general existence of things of general qualities of things being true, nor does this "constancy of existence" (so to speak) exclude a constancy of God's and Angels' direct actions about and in the Universe. For instance, it is not in conflict with God turning the visible universe around us full circle in 23 h 55 minutes or angels carrying particular bodies, Sun, Moon and Stars (both fix stars and planets) in some kind of orbits in relation to that general movement. We have thus no reason to conclude for a universe so vast it's lights couldn't reach earth in Biblical chronology with normal light speed, or so vast that, whatever the actual implication be, one at least gets the impression that Heaven isn't a non-rotating sphere with a solid floor above the daily rotation of the fix stars.
Miracles are rare, and they have humdrum consequences. Their causality is assymetric, they have in the end of their cause God Himself, but in the end of their effect the natural effects of whatever God includes in the miracle. I'd argue that one category of miracles are punitive miracles, the Flood was one of them. I'd also argue that it would have taken loads of extra miracles to keep the Ark floating in the relatively shallow waters of a local or large regional Flood, but it would have been a fairly natural conqequence between takeoff and landing an a world wide Ocean of a depth very deep. So, the science we know speak strongly against any version of the Flood other than the global one. Schooner Wyoming sank in Nantucket Bay at a medium or shallowest depth of 9 meters.
The "many layers" you speak of are wharves, and Guy Berthault (the work of which seems to have been underestimated heavily by Dr. Meyers, Edward Cotter and Jonathon Wolf in a paper I found when looking up) has shown rapid formation of wharves or laminations. Features of Grand Canyon needing supposedly a more than annual periodicity to form on top of each other have received attention from Creationists in a way that satisfies me.
IBSS: Other Views: Guy Berthault
https://www.bibleandscience.com/otherviews/berthault.htm
The Ice Age is supposed to have taken time on a Young Earth Creationist view too. Part of your argument seems to rely on some kind of cycles of the isotopes of Oxygen. In sea water as such, I have trouble seeing how the cycles could be detected. The "last of the" glaciation-"s" is supposed to be distinguished from the others by carbon date, that being so because a remnant from Saalian / Wolstonian / Illinoian would routinely not be carbon dated, even if organic material were available. As the bones of a Lake Mungo skeleton are carbon dated to 20 000 years ago, approximately, and the thermoluminiscence of surrounding sand goes to 40 000 years, I do not trust thermoluminiscence to be even moderately accurate at least this far back. The carbon date "20 000 BP" or "18 000 BC" would in my view point to a date between 2725 and 2712 BC:
- 2725 BC
- 14.329 pmC, dated as 18,786 BC
- 2712 BC
- 17.585 pmC, dated as 17,081 BC
Creation vs. Evolution: Newer Tables, Flood to Joseph in Egypt
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2024/12/newer-tables-flood-to-joseph-in-egypt.html
I think I have shown I do not actually totally lack responses, I don't consider I owe the question an open mind which you don't apparently have for views opposing your view.