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