Tag: Creation Conference

Bozeman creation conference – Does Genesis Really Matter?

On By geochristianIn Age of the Earth, Apologetics, Christianity, Creation in the Bible, Creationism, Geology, Origins, Young-Earth creationism7 Comments
AN OLD-EARTH CHRISTIAN AT A YOUNG-EARTH CONFERENCE

This is the second in a series of articles about a young-Earth creationism (YEC) conference held in Bozeman, Montana in April, 2016.

1. Bozeman creation conference preview and expectations

2. This article – Does Genesis Really Matter? – Yes Genesis does matter, whether a Christian believes in a young Earth or an old Earth.

3. What you haven’t been told about radioisotope dating – I will tell you what YECs haven’t told you about radioisotope dating.

4. Coming in the future – Ice ages, seafloor sediments, dinosaur bones, and more.

As I was paging through the brochure for this year’s young-Earth creationism conference—there is a large YEC conference like this in Bozeman every other year—I was struck once again by the educational background of the main speakers, all of whom will speak on geological issues:

  • An M.S. in Biotechnology
  • A PhD in Physics
  • An M.S. in Atmospheric Science.

Where is the geologist?

If I used this question as an argument against a point they were making, I would be making an ad hominem argument, and I will avoid that. I certainly wander outside of my areas of expertise from time to time (I will write about Hebrew grammar in a bit). But it is certainly interesting that so few Christian geologists are convinced by young-Earth arguments.

Talk #1 – Does Genesis Really Matter? – Brian Thomas, Institute for Creation Research

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of The GeoChristian that I found things to agree with in Mr. Thomas’s presentation. Genesis lays a foundation for a number of doctrines that run throughout the Bible, such as sin, redemption, and marriage. These doctrines have their beginnings in the book of beginnings, find their highest fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and are fully realized in Christ in the closing chapters of Revelation. As I have said in my Creation Creeds, I believe in a real Adam, in a real garden, committing a real sin, with real consequences.

So, yes, Genesis matters. What Mr. Thomas failed to demonstrate is that accepting a young Earth is necessary in order for Genesis to matter.

Mr. Thomas began by pointing to the decline of Christianity in our culture. Despite our many churches and institutions, the nation is become less Christian over time. Two-thirds of our Christian youth leave the church when they become adults (I would say that part of the problem is YEC). He then set up a choice: are we going to listen to God’s Word, or man’s word? Of course, I believe we should listen to God’s Word, but I am not convinced that YEC is the best way to understand God’s Word, and that a false dichotomy was once again set up: we have to choose between YEC and old-Earth evolutionism. To his credit, Thomas did say that one does not have to be a YEC in order to be a Christian. I hope that sunk in with the audience.

Mr. Thomas went on to attempt to poke holes in various old-Earth interpretations of Genesis 1, such as the gap interpretation and day-age interpretation. Some of his points were valid, but not all. I will pick two of his anti-old-Earth arguments

Mr. Thomas (who acknowledged he doesn’t read Hebrew) said that both Genesis 1:2 and Genesis 1:3 begin with a waw disjunctive, which is a Hebrew grammatical construction that carries the story along, and is often translated in English as “and.”

2 and the earth was without form and void…

3 and God said, “Let there be light.”

I will start by being nitpicky (though I don’t read Hebrew either): verse 2 starts with a waw disjunctive, but verse 3 starts with a waw consecutive, and some have said this distinction is quite important in understanding the relationships between these verses. In any case, Thomas’s point was that this story all flows as one event after another, a point that not all Hebrew scholars agree with. But even if the story were connected by one waw disjunctive after another, that would not require events follow one another immediately. In English, I could say, “My ancestors emigrated from Norway in the 1880s, and my grandparents moved to Montana, and I was born in Billings, and I went to college in Bozeman.” The word “and” would be the waw disjunctive, and nothing in this sentence requires that the events must have occurred immediately one after the other; only that they occurred, probably in the order stated. In reality, these events in my family history were spread out over a century.

Mr. Thomas then stated that any time “day” is associated with a number in the Old Testament, the day is an ordinary 24-hour day. I have heard that this is a YEC rule of grammar, not necessarily a fixed Hebrew rule of grammar. Genesis 1 has a rather unique layout in Hebrew literature, and YECs do not always take this into account when reading the chapter. From many YEC presentations, there are only two Old Testament genres: historical narrative and poetry. In this, the YECs greatly oversimplify the issue. What is the genre, or type, of literature is Genesis 1? It is a narrative, but it is not a “historical narrative” such as what is found in much of the rest of Genesis. There are no true parallels of the structure of Genesis 1 in the Old Testament; indeed in all of ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature. Yes, the days are numbered. But certainly some of these days are unlike any other: days with unique creation events, days without the sun, days that suggest lengthy processes. These distinctives must be taken into account. In any case, the Hebrew word yom (day) is used in a non-24-hour-day way elsewhere in the passage, such as 1:5 and 2:4. There are a number of other reasons to question that these were literal days, as developed in the analogical days interpretation.

Does accepting an old Earth undermine any Biblical doctrines? Mr Thomas, like many YECs, said that if there was death before sin, the gospel is undermined. I would say that this YEC statement is not firmly based in Scripture. There is no passage in Scripture that ties animal death to Adam’s sin. Neither Genesis 3, Romans 5, Romans 8, or 1 Corinthians 15—the passages that discuss Adam’s sin—say anything whatsoever about animal death. If the Scriptures don’t tie animal death to Adam’s sin, we should not insist that there is a connection.

Mr. Thomas touched on some scientific issues in his presentation. I will address only one: the geologic time scale. He stated that the geologic time scale is based on circular reasoning: fossils date the rocks and rocks date the fossils. This is a common YEC argument, and it is wrong.

The geologic time scale (or geologic column) is a product of inductive reasoning, not circular reasoning. Geologists have observed that, based on fossils, rock layers always occur in a certain order, which geologists have labeled as Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, etc. The layers always occur in this same order in undeformed (not folded or faulted) rocks. It is never Jurassic-Ordovician-Permian-Cambrian or some other order. Never. There are even some sedimentary basins, such as the Williston Basin of western North Dakota, that contain rock layers of every Period from Cambrian through Quaternary, in proper order. Even in areas subjected to severe folding and faulting, this “law of fossil succession” holds true once the deformation is unraveled. There is no circular reasoning here.

I could say much more, and I have spent more time on our differences than on our common ground. But as old-Earth and young-Earth Christians, our common ground is much greater, and much more important.

  • The universe was created from nothing by the triune God of the Bible.
  • The universe belongs to God and displays his glory.
  • Humans are created in the image of God and therefore have great worth.
  • Humans are place in a position of responsibility over the Earth, and yet are embedded in Earth’s ecology.
  • Humans are sinful, which has broken our relationship with God, with each other, and with the creation.
  • Jesus Christ is the savior, the redeemer, and the king over the creation.

Grace and Peace

 

 

Bozeman creation conference preview and expectations

On By geochristianIn Age of the Earth, Apologetics, Creationism, Geology, Origins, Young-Earth creationism8 Comments
AN OLD-EARTH CHRISTIAN AT A YOUNG-EARTH CONFERENCE

This is the first in a series of articles about a young-Earth creationism (YEC) conference held in Bozeman, Montana in April, 2016.

1. This article – Bozeman creation conference preview and expectations

2. Does Genesis Really Matter? – Yes Genesis does matter, whether a Christian believes in a young Earth or an old Earth.

3. What you haven’t been told about radioisotope dating – I will tell you what YECs haven’t told you about radioisotope dating.

4. Coming in the future – Ice ages, seafloor sediments, dinosaur bones, and more.

On April 1-3, 2016, Grace Bible Church in Bozeman, Montana will be hosting a Creation Conference featuring three prominent young-Earth advocates. I plan on attending this conference, and posting reviews and critiques here on The GeoChristian. My goal is not to be provocative or argumentative, but to listen, think, and write. I am usually pretty quiet when I attend events like this, though I will ask a question or two at the appropriate times, and interact with speakers and people sitting around me. I plan on writing summaries similar to those I wrote when Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson of the Institute for Creation Research spoke in Billings in 2012.

Young-Earth creationists are first and foremost my brothers and sisters in Christ. I love and respect them, and appreciate their zeal for the Bible, for Christ, for evangelism, and for discipleship. In these things they and I are on the same page (for the most part). I do, however, believe that young-Earth creationism is not required by the Bible, and that it is not credible scientifically. Because of this, YEC apologetics (defense of the faith) sometimes does far more damage than good, especially among the scientifically literate.

It is important to add that I was a member of Grace Bible Church when I was an undergraduate student at Montana State University in the early 1980s. The church was (and I assume still is) an excellent, Bible-believing, Christ-honoring, people-loving church, and the teaching I received there laid a strong foundation for my life as a Christian. I am deeply thankful for the influence Grace Bible Church has had on my life.

I plan to attend the following Friday evening and all-day Saturday sessions. The biographies of the speakers can be found here.

  1. Brian Thomas (Institute for Creation Research) – Why Genesis Matters.

From my experiences at previous YEC seminars, I expect that I will be in substantial agreement with the speaker on this one. Genesis lays the foundation for many key themes that run throughout the Scriptures: The one and only true God, humans created in the image of God, human sin, redemption, marriage, grace, forgiveness, covenants, and so forth. One thing on which I will disagree with Mr. Thomas will be his insistence that if Earth is millions of years old, then these foundations crumble. There is nothing in the Scriptures that ties any of these doctrines to the age of the universe.

  1. Dr. Jake Hebert (Institute for Creation Research) – What You Haven’t Been Told About Radiometric Dating.

My expectation is that Dr. Hebert will talk about discordant dates, accelerated nuclear decay, and carbon-14 found in coal and diamonds. What Dr. Hebert will not tell the audience is that radiometric dating usually works, which was the major unspoken finding of ICR’s RATE study. Because radiometric dating usually works, the main thing YECs have fallen back on is the idea of vastly accelerated nuclear decay rates, a hypothesis that has a number of serious problems.

  1. Michael Oard (the “Mr. Ice Age” of the YEC world) – The Ice Age: Only the Bible Can Explain It!

I expect that Mr. Oard will state that the ice age is “impossible with evolution, easy with creation.” I, on the other hand, find YEC post-flood ice age scenarios even less credible than their whole flood geology schemes.

  1. Hebert – Ice Cores and Deep Seafloor Sediments: Do They Really Prove Millions of Years?

I suppose that means what one means by “prove.” Does the signature of John Hancock on the U.S. constitution prove that John Hancock existed? I’m sure we could come up with some conspiracy theory to cast doubt on Hancock’s existence. I haven’t read much YEC material on this topic, so I am not really sure what to expect. I have been conditioned by YEC writings, however, to expect problems.

  1. Oard — What Does the Lake Missoula Flood Teach Us?

Mr. Oard will tell us that there was only one Lake Missoula flood. The driver for Oard’s conviction is that the YEC timeline is already squeezed to the limits, so any evidence for multiple Lake Missoula floods must be disregarded. One thing the Lake Missoula floods teach us that Mr. Oard is unlikely to mention is that if Earth’s surface was shaped by catastrophic global flooding only 4300 years ago, then the dominant erosional geomorphic features on Earth’s surface ought to be extensive channeled scablands such as found on the Columbia Plateau. And this is not at all what we see.

  1. Hebert – Exciting New Research at ICR.

(This is the topic listed on the creationsciencedefense.com site; the ICR events site lists the topic as “Does the ‘God Particle’ Prove the Big Bang?”)

The ICR Research page lists several projects, including:

  • Column Project: analyzing rock layers globally to reconstruct the stages of the Genesis Flood and explain why certain fossils are found only in certain areas, and to determine the approximate topography of the pre-Flood world.
  • Refuting Milankovitch Project: exposing circular and inconsistent reasoning in secular methodologies

The fact that YECs have to have a research project about the geologic column reminds us that the geologic column is a valid concept, and that YECs haven’t figured out how to explain it yet. And of course Milankovitch cycles are clearly anti-Biblical and must be exposed!

  1. Thomas – The Beginning of Life.

I will probably agree with much of what Mr. Thomas has to say. The simplest conceivable, metabolizing, reproducing cell is an incredibly complex thing, and sixty years of origin-of-life studies have only accented the gap between non-life and life. But this is a tentative position on my part, and is based on my understanding of the science of abiogenesis. I don’t think the Bible precludes the possibility of God creating a universe that is so wonderfully designed that life could spring from non-life.

  1. Hebert – Science or Science Fiction? Why the Laws of Physics Could Not Have Created the Universe.

I am not sure whether this will be a presentation of the cosmological argument, which I would be in agreement with, or an attack on Big Bang cosmology. I will probably be getting rather sleepy by this point on Saturday afternoon.

  1. Thomas – Soft Tissues in Solid Rock.

YECs believe that the discovery of soft tissues in dinosaur fossils (a discovery made by a Christian paleontologist!) was a nail in the coffin of old-Earthism. The finding of protein fragments and pliable tissues in Cretaceous fossils was certainly unexpected, but for several reasons is not a death blow to the concept of millions of years.

In addition to these grown-up sessions, there will be a number of meetings for young people, with topics such as “Why the World is Only Thousands of Years Old,” “‘Global Warming’ and the Christian,” and “Dinosaurs & Dragons.” Those teaching the children are certainly well-intentioned, but are also setting some of the kids up for a fall.

As I often say: Young-Earth creationism is neither required by the Bible nor credible scientifically. Bad science is bad apologetics that turns people away from the gospel.

Please pray for me, the speakers, the audience, and most of all, the youth who will be attending this conference.

Grace and Peace