Careful Thought

UPDATE:  I found this gem in the search engine logs: “how old is the earth? christianity vs science.”  That’s a pretty telling statement about attitudes that the young-earthers have engendered.  They force a false chasm between faith and science.  I want my kids to understand the role of science in confirming God’s creation, not fearing science as an evil thing.

ORIGINAL POST:  As a believer, I have a passing interest in various theories regarding the age of the earth. This is not a salvation issue, though some choose to make it one. In general, I guess I would be considered an old earth Progressive Creationist . In a nutshell, my belief is that God created the universe about 14 billion years ago and the earth 6-8 billion years ago. When the time was right, probably 4-6 thousand years ago, God created Adam in the Garden and that portion of Genesis began.

My concern with young-earth creationists is that they have to go to extreme lengths to either a) reject any objective physical evidence of an older creation; b) place old-earth creationists in league with evolutionists; c) create elaborate theories to make the evidence fit a young earth mold; or d) some combination of the above. The net result is false division between faith and science. Obviously there are those in the science community who reject faith and go so far as to mock the faith community for its belief, but somewhere in the middle is a harmony of Scripture, common sense, and the natural record.

I’ll go out on a limb - there is nothing in the natural world that can contradict Scripture. We can argue about interpretation of Scripture or of the natural world, for that matter, but God created the world and He is not in the business of creating something against His nature. Ultimately, any conflict can be resolved in favor of God’s Word, without standing science on its head to do it.

When I read of Christians who claim to have found evidence of man cohabitating with the dinosaurs or creating fantastic theories to explain how wooly mammoths (and the dinosaurs) died in the Flood, my head hurts and I ache for my brothers.

This is from CreationEvidence.org (the folks who found the Paluxy dino/man footprints debunked here and here ). It attempts to date the demise of the big critters:

The big question is “When did it happen?” Based on Biblical history, the event happened after the Flood of Noah. Not all people agree with this conclusion.

But there were other effects of the orientation change. Great tidal waves were reported by the Chinese and North American Indians. The Sahara dried out and became a desert. Its present condition appears to have begun after 2000 B.C. The Tarim basin in China was once populated with cities and settlements and forests. Now it is mostly desert. There is evidence that India, Pakistan and Iran all had abundant rainfall before the climate changed. Large areas of former agricultural land on the India-Pakistan border are now desert. American deserts once had abundant rainfall based on pollen and tree remnants found at archaeological sites. All the world’s deserts seem to have started about 3500 years ago. This is the same period identified by Charles Ginenthal for the extinction of the mammoths. It is also the time of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

Read the whole article, but the author can’t stretch the facts enough to fit his theory. I’m thinking that if there was such a massive cataclysm after the Flood , it probably would have been recorded in Scripture. Where is the supporting evidence for assuming that all deserts started 3500 years ago?

The age of the earth is irrelevant to our salvation and to God’s plan for our lives and for the planet, but it makes for interesting debate. I just wish folks would let the physical evidence speak for itself. Maybe if things look old, they really are.

Technorati : age of the earth , old earth creation , young earth creation

This week’s image is another Caravaggio . The painting is Supper at Emmaus (See Luke 24:13-35 ) from 1598. Caravaggio was an against-the-grain type of painter in that he refused to paint his subjects (particularly his religious subjects) using traditional conventions. Here, Christ is shown as a robust, un-haloed, well-fed, beardless young man. Unlike the artist’s Incredulity of St Thomas , in this painting he does not show the resurrected Christ with the marks of crucifixion.
(HT: Malaspina - Lecture on Baroque Art , Russell McNeil, PhD)

Tags: Caravaggio, faith in art, Supper at Emmaus

Doug at Stones Cry Out blog [no link] posts this bit from WND :

Year Kennesaw, GA passed a law requiring every head of household in the town to own a handgun: 1982
Kennesaw crime rate prior to enactment: 4,332 per 100,000
National average: 3,899 per 100,000
Kennesaw crime rate today: 2,027 per 100,000
Number of residents involved in fatal shootings since enactment, as either victim, attacker or defender: 0
Population growth, 1980 to 2000: 425% (5.095 to 21,675)

Police Lt. Craig Graydon said: “When the Kennesaw law was passed in 1982 there was a substantial drop in crime … and we have maintained a really low crime rate since then. We are sure it is one of the lowest (crime) towns in the metro [Atlanta] area.”

Compare that with Morton Grove, IL, where legal gun ownership was banned for anyone not a cop:

The population [of Morton Grove], has actually dropped slightly and stands at 22,202, according to 2005 statistics. More significantly, perhaps, the city’s crime rate increased by 15.7 percent immediately after the gun ban, even though the overall crime rate in Cook County rose only 3 percent. Today, by comparison, the township’s crime rate stands at 2,268 per 100,000.

Tags: gun control, gun laws, Kennesaw, Morton Grove

Hmmm. If this doesn’t qualify as global whining, then it must be interplanetary warming. Man, those Republicans are sneaky. Who’d have thunk that they’d force NASA into using 4×4 rovers on Mars? Now look what they’ve done…

Climate change hits Mars Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.

When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.

Technorati : global whining , mars

The frequently-clever Karen just posted a What am I Reading meme.  Here’s what’s on the nightstand:

The Frigates by James Henderson. Great stories of ship-to-ship action from the glory days of the Royal Navy in the age of sail. I’m writing a never-finished novel in that era and it’s great research material and just plain good reading.

The Pickwick Papers. I’m on a Dickens audiobook binge that started with Tale of Two Cities, then David Copperfield and Great Expectations.

Technorati : books , meme

This one is not passing the common sense test, either. Here is a Christian school that is getting slammed for “using Biblical quotations in pupils’ reports.” I’m not sure of the context here, whether it was in the student report cards or some other documentation, but we obviously can’t have Christian schools using Christian references, can we?

School slammed for using Bible in reports Published: 15th April 2007 13:18 CET

A school in western Sweden has been reprimanded by authorities after it used biblical quotations in pupils’ reports.

The Borås Christian School was also slammed by the Swedish National Agency for Education for not employing a high enough proportion of qualified teachers, and for leaving out central parts of the curriculum in certain subjects.

Headmaster Nils Håkan Sjölin told Swedish Radio that some of the criticism was based on misunderstandings, but he said that the school would listen and make the changes demanded by authorities. [In other words, he caved.]

“Our intention is to do this according to the framework of the law and of society, but parents who send their children to our school must be prepared for them come home and say that God exists,” said Sjölin.

Sjölin added that he expected the proportion of qualified teachers to rise from 56 percent at the time of the inspection last year, to 80 percent within a year.

The school, funded by public money, teaches pupils from pre-school age up to age 16.

I’m thinking that this whole global whining thing needs a catchier name. How about the Global War on Common Sense ? The enviro-loons (sorry, Laz) are pushing for new lower-energy compact flourescent bulbs and a ban for the old stand by incandescent standard bulbs. What they don’t tell you is 1) the much higher cost of the new bulbs, 2) the new bulbs contain hazardous levels of mercury. Looks like there are some pretty dim bulbs out there. Here’s the FoxNews version:

Junk Science: Light Bulb Lunacy Thursday, April 26, 2007

By Steven Milloy

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About $4.28 for the bulb and labor - unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about $2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favor of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) - a move already either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia.

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.

The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a “low-ball” estimate of $2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began “gathering finances” to pay for the $2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as $180 annually in energy costs - and assuming that Bridges doesn’t break any more CFLs - it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

Technorati : global whining

A 2006 study found that the average Canadian walks about 900 miles per year.

Another study found that Canadians drink an average of 22 gallons of beer per year.

That means on average, Canadians get 41 miles per gallon. I’m thinking we should start following Canadian mileage standards.

This is the Flammarion Woodcut , which probably isn’t actually a woodcut , but rather a wood carving. It depicts,

“…a man, dressed as a medieval pilgrim and carrying a pilgrim’s staff, peering through the sky as if it were a curtain to look at the inner workings of the universe. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery bears a strong resemblance to traditional pictorial representations of the “wheel in the middle of a wheel” described in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel. The caption translates as “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched…” The image accompanies a text which reads, in part, “What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?”‘

Flammarion (1842-1925) was a bibliophile and book collector, astronomer and engraver.

The image of a pilgrim encountering a spherical heavenly vault separating the earth from the heavens appeared in Flammarion’s Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (”The Imaginary Worlds and the Real Worlds,” 1865) and was probably created by the author.

I find this image interesting because it speaks to me of our desire to understand the world around us in light of Scripture.

Tags: art, faith, faith in art, flammarion

Would you put a Christian bumper sticker on your vehicle? I have no problem with the idea, but a good friend says that he wouldn’t because has has occasionally blasted over the speed limit or cut off other drivers in traffic, and that wouldn’t be a good witness. I’m a believer that as Christians, we have an obligation to live in glass houses. Matt 5:16 says, ‘Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.’ ( NASB )

We are a witness to society, warts and all, whether we choose to or not, so long as we call ourselves Christians. The obligation inherent in that verse, though, is that we are not to live as the world lives. It’s in that second part that I tend to stumble. When I made the previous post about eating pig , I included a rather uncharitable descriptor for the PETA folks. That’s not how we are called to represent Christ to the world, no matter what the world believes or how a particular group (PETA, Islam, or whoever) behaves.

I apologize if my posts have presented a less than Christ-like appearance to the world.

I still love bacon, though.

“ He who guards his mouth and his tongue, Guards his soul from troubles. ” (Proverbs 21:23, NASB )

Tags: bumper stickers, faith, glass houses