Careful Thought

If you’re into the science of creation, Reasons.org has a great semi-weekly podcast called Science News Flash, available for free subscription through iTunes.  Each episode is anywhere from 5-17 minutes long and deals with a science topic that’s been in the news from a Biblical perspective.  Recent topics include everything from tectonic plates and earthquakes to the reason men have breasts.

Young-earth creationists tend to dislike Reasons because the ministry takes an old-earth view of creation (e.g., the cosmos was created 13+ billion years ago) while demonstrating the unity of special revelation (Scripture) and general revelation (creation).  YEC-ers tend to disdain the general revelation as somehow being inferior.  I have a problem with that approach because nothing God does is inferior.

The podcasts are great for listening in the car.  With each episode I am more amazed at the God’s creative brilliance and how clearly His fingerprint shows in His creation.

Technorati Tags: creation, faith, OEC, podcasts, Reasons.org, science, YEC

Tags: creation, faith, OEC, podcasts, Reasons.org, science, YEC

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

I added a new poll in the sidebar that addresses creation, evolution, and origins of life.  If you need to define terms, mouse over the following:  Young Earth Creation, Old Earth Gap Theory, Old Earth Progressive/Day-Age Creation, Theistic Evolution, Non-Theistic Evolution.

(HT: Michael Patton at Reclaiming the Mind and Vance McAllister at Submerging Influence)

Technorati Tags: age of the earth, creation, evolution, OEC, old earth, polls, YEC, young earth

Tags: age of the earth, creation, evolution, OEC, old earth, polls, YEC, young earth

As a firm believer in Old Earth (i.e., multi-bazillion years ago) Creation of the earth and the heavens by a loving creator God, I find it interesting that there is growing rancor in secular cosmological circles as to the exact mechanism and timing of creation. The Big Bang is no longer a given. The only thing I can say for certain is that all evidence points to a long ago Creative Act - well before the 4000 years that Young-Earthers preach.

Bullet Cluster Shoots Down Big Bang

(From Thunderbolts) Optical and x-ray images of the galaxy cluster named 1E0657-56 have provided direct proof that these clumps of disturbed galaxies are small, faint, and nearby. These and many similar observations directly contradict the foundational assumptions of the Big Bang, which place the objects far away.

What we have stated in the headline and abstract above is, of course, an interpretation, not a fact. But the distinction between interpretation and fact has become so muddled in the sciences that we felt obliged to underscore the point rhetorically. Unbending theoretical assumptions have wrought havoc on popular astronomy, which could not recognize our interpretation of the Bullet Cluster based on the known electrical behavior of plasma.

According to the authors of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory website, the galactic cluster imaged above “was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang.” Though the announcement by the Chandra team never uses the words “theory,” “hypothesis,” or “interpretation,” its every sentence rests on a jumble of assumptions, from supposed galactic “collisions” to wildly conjectural “gravitational lensing,” all wrapped around the discredited notion that redshift is a reliable measure of velocity and distance. The capper is the announcement appearing in numerous scientific media that the image “proves the existence of dark matter.”

In electrical terms, the Hubble optical image shows the many distorted galaxies and filaments of plasma that have been identified by the astronomer Halton Arp as the fragments of a quasar (QSO, or quasi-stellar object) after it has moved through an evolving, highly redshifted and unstable “BL Lac” phase. The BL Lac transition breaks up the increasingly massive plasma of the quasar as it progresses toward becoming a companion galaxy.

From an electrical vantage point, the Chandra x-ray image (pink) clearly shows the bell-shaped terminus and following arc of a plasma discharge “jet.” The strong magnetic field of the current causes electrons to emit the x-ray synchrotron (non-thermal) radiation captured in the image. Synchrotron radiation is a normal electrical discharge effect.

But popular astronomy, oblivious to electrical phenomena, sees only “hot gases colliding.”

Technorati Tags: big bang, creation, dark matter, electrical universe, faith, OEC, YEC

Tags: big bang, creation, dark matter, electrical universe, faith, OEC, YEC