Careful Thought

Scribal Terror has a short piece on the discovery of a pristine baby woolly-mammoth carcass.  From a National Geographic report:

A Russian hunter traipsing through Russia’s remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May [2007] noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow.  . . .

On closer inspection, the “reindeer” turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.

The six-month-old female mammoth [nicknamed 'Lyuba' after the hunter's wife, which may not be a compliment] is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.

“It’s a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition,” Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.

So how did the critter come to be ‘perfectly encased in ice’ 40,000 years ago?  How do you respond to this from a young-earth-creationist perspective?  Did Lyuba fall off the ark?  What do you do with those pesky ice ages that show up periodically in the natural record?  On which creation day did the ice ages (plural) occur?

The natural record can’t conflict with Scripture, it can only conflict with our interpretation of it.  Trying to shoehorn wooly mammoths (or dinosaurs for that matter) and multiple ice ages into a YEC interpretation of the creation account gets interesting, to say the least.

Technorati Tags: creationism, ice ages, Lyuba, mammoths, OEC, YEC

Tags: creationism, ice ages, Lyuba, mammoths, OEC, YEC

That’s it.  I quit.  I give in.  Yesterday the pastor preached through the science portion of Focus on the Family’s Truth Project, and hammered those who, like me, hold to an old-earth creation view.

I’ve got no beef with the Truth Project.  It’s a DVD-based small group series that provides a Scripture-based response to the secular worldviews.  Overall, it’s a well-produced survey of the issues of truth, theology (who is God?), anthropology (who is man?) and a number of other cultural topics.  Even the science portion is well-balanced, focusing primarily on evolution vs creation issues.  I would recommend the series to anyone looking for a solid small-group curriculum.

To his credit, the pastor pulled me aside before the service and warned me that he would be covering the material from a young earth view.  Overall, I have no beef with young-earth creationists, so long as they recognize that their view is one of many, and that holding something other than a young-earth view does not invalidate one’s salvation.  Unfortunately, that seems to be the direction many YECers want to take it.  I heard yesterday, and I’ve heard it many times before, the implication that “if old-earth creationists don’t trust Genesis, then they don’t trust the rest of Scripture.”

Horse hockey.  I trust every word of Genesis, and the rest of Scripture to boot.  I just don’t hold to that particular interpretation of the Creation account.

My spousal unit is the lone Protestant in Catholic Bible study.  She has frequently been told that Protestants are ‘incomplete’ Christians.  That’s what I’m taking from the young-earth crowd, as well - old-earth creationists ‘are still Christians, but….’

That’s a big but.

Here’s the question: how do I respond?  In every other respect, I am in complete agreement with the pastor’s teaching.  Do I suck it up and seek to respond in grace, knowing that I’m viewed as a tainted Christian?  Walk off in a huff?

Technorati Tags: creationism, OEC, science, truth project, YEC

Tags: creationism, OEC, science, truth project, YEC

David Heddle at He Lives has yet another great post on the science vs Christianity ‘debate.’  Here’s a snippet, but go read the rest of the article, along with the comments. 

I wish Christians, particularly YECs, would get over the idea that science and faith conflict.  All truth is God’s truth, by definition, so the search for scientific truth is consistent with Christian faith.  Not so, according to some commenters.  In my view, facts are devoid of emotional baggage, so any particular connotation, from either a secular or religious view, are appended to the facts and are not inherent.  Observations of the earth and the cosmos, for instance, reveal the appearance of great age.  If you feel that conflicts with Scripture, I would contend that the problem is not with the facts or with Scripture, but with the interpretation you bring to both.

This is an extremely interesting interview with a Christian scientist, Don Page. I’m not sure that I can find anything in the lengthy interview with which I disagree, and for a contrarian such as I, that is not common.

Speaking of scientists who happen to be Christian, a thread on Ed Brayton’s blog degenerated into the usual nonsense about “compartmentalization.” It all started when one person stated flat-out:

And no, I am sorry, but I can not accept that one can be a “real” scientist AND be religious.

Others backed away, admitting that Christians could be good scientists, but they had to “compartmentalize.” This is a description of a mental handicap, not shared by “real” scientists, that permits people of faith to be scientists from 9 to 5, and irrational beings other times, especially on Sunday.
But this is meaningless. No scientist is a scientist 24/7. Mr. Spock is a fictional character. I’m willing to bet that Richard Dawkins has had some irrational arguments with his spouse (If he has or had one. I don’t know.) If not, then he would be the first married man in history to avoid succumbing to occasional matrimonial irrationality.

Technorati Tags: creationism, faith, faith vs sciece, science

Tags: creationism, faith, faith vs sciece, science