Young Earth Questions

[Eagle]

I saw that some (certainly not most) Orthodox Jews to believe in creationism and even YE creationism on the Wikipedia page on this topic. It's interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism

What an interesting read! Thanks for linking.

 

"Since 1982, between 40% and 50% of adults in the United States say they hold the young Earth view that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" when Gallup asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings."

 

From the article I understand that YE is mostly an American belief, but it is way more widespread than I thought within the US.

[Wheres Toto]

What an interesting read! Thanks for linking.

 

"Since 1982, between 40% and 50% of adults in the United States say they hold the young Earth view that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" when Gallup asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings."

 

From the article I understand that YE is mostly an American belief, but it is way more widespread than I thought within the US.

 

I think for a lot of people, agreeing with that statement doesn't necessarily mean Young EARTH.  That statement just says no to evolution and that humans have only been around for 10,000 years.  I think a lot of people only have a very vague idea about how long humans (of some form) have been around and may just think "Eh, 10,000 years sounds about right".  I'd like to see what the other choices were.  

[acreecav]

An article in Christianity Today shows that the Gallup polls are misleading because they give people too few options.  When A Christian sociology professor at Calvin College  surveyed people with similar questions, he also followed up with questions about how certain they were.  Of those agreeing with the statement that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years," only 5% said they were "absolutely certain," and some even said they were "not at all sure," apparently because they liked the other answer choices even less.

 

You can read the article here: "Rethinking the Origins Debate: Most Americans--and most Christians--do not fall neatly into creationist or evolutionist camps."

[maize]

 

The Weirdest Religious Demographic Ever: Non-Christians Who Think the Bible is Literally True

 

 

 

0.o

 

 

I checked the link and don't see an explanation of how Christian is defined. If, for example, the definition excluded members of less traditional churches such as LDS and JW, some of that demographic may be explained.

[Corraleno]

What an interesting read! Thanks for linking.

 

"Since 1982, between 40% and 50% of adults in the United States say they hold the young Earth view that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" when Gallup asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings."

 

From the article I understand that YE is mostly an American belief, but it is way more widespread than I thought within the US.

 

I think for a lot of people, agreeing with that statement doesn't necessarily mean Young EARTH.  That statement just says no to evolution and that humans have only been around for 10,000 years.  I think a lot of people only have a very vague idea about how long humans (of some form) have been around and may just think "Eh, 10,000 years sounds about right".  I'd like to see what the other choices were.  

 

I read an article that compared responses to these kinds of questions, and the responses varied enormously depending on how they were worded. For example, when asked if God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years, roughly half said yes. But in a separate survey, when asked if the earth was less than 10,000 years old, only 18% said yes. 

 

It appears that the majority of the people who say yes to the first question are really just agreeing with the idea that "God created humans," not that the earth itself is only 10,000 years old.

[maize]

I read an article that compared responses to these kinds of questions, and the responses varied enormously depending on how they were worded. For example, when asked if God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years, roughly half said yes. But in a separate survey, when asked if the earth was less than 10,000 years old, only 18% said yes. 

 

It appears that the majority of the people who say yes to the first question are really just agreeing with the idea that "God created humans," not that the earth itself is only 10,000 years old.

 

Or they believe the earth is older than 10,000 years but humans were a more recent creation.

[kiana]

Interesting reading:

 

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolution-Creationism-Intelligent-Design.aspx

[Free]

1. While I agree that scientists endeavor to remove personal bias and provide repeatable results, it is impossible to be completely objective in interpreting those results. They cannot remove their individual body of knowledge, past experiences, and everything else that makes them who and what they are. I am not saying that they look at a set of raw data and declare that they can only interpret it according to their personal belief system--that's ludicrous. But the established fact that various scientists can look at the identical raw data and interpret it very differently indicates that the human mind is not a constant.

 

2. Who said that YE is a testable hypothesis? Who said that long term evolution is a testable hypothesis? There is no way to scientifically recreate conditions for either and set it up against a control. We can make observations on current conditions, and we can extract observations recorded in human history, but we can't test and prove either YE or long term evolution.

 

I have been thinking about your last post, especially these two points because it strikes me that these points hit the core of the creation-evolution debate. I have seen YEC adherents often claim that since you cannot go back in time to actually see what happened in the past, there was "no way of knowing". What I had not realised though, was that YECists believe that "historical science" does not need to be testable. That is quite a remarkable claim, but one which clarifies so much!

 

It seems that you have been led to believe that all that historical sciences have to do is "interpret" data. I can see why such an idea can lead to the often repeated claim that scientists can vary in their interpretation, or that scientists bring their worldviews to their interpretation and so on. There can be as many "interpretations" of data as there are people, really. If I can imagine something, I can propose a hypothesis - anything ranging from UFOs and aliens can be proposed as explanations for phenomena. And if I have the time and patience, I can also carefully make the data fit my hypothesis. That is how conspiracy theories are born. Clearly you have been misled about the nature of science, because this is not "science".

 

A fundamental requirement for an idea to be scientific is that it should be falsifiable and that it should be testable. And here we come to your second point about "recreating conditions", because that is another false teaching propagated by the likes of AIG. Time is not the only constraint which limits what science can investigate in a laboratory. There can be other constraints such as size and distance. We know electrons exist even though we have not seen them. We know about stars which died long long ago, because we see their light now. We know the composition of these stars even though we never took a sample. We know about black holes even though we have never entered one. We know dinosaurs existed and what they looked like even though we never saw one. We know that the earth has a core of iron, even though we have never dug so far. We convict criminals based on DNA, hair or fibers left behind at a crime scene. It is naive to think that science can only study that which happens "right before our eyes".

 

It is also a misconception that "hard sciences" like physics always use laboratory tests to confirm their theories. Consider everyone's favourite theory, the Theory of Universal Gravitation. Of course, gravity is pretty obvious on earth. But when Newton proposed that gravity was responsible for the elliptical orbits of the planets and comets, there was no way to directly test this short of space travel. Newton himself realised the absurdity of his proposal: 

"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."

 

Yet today we take gravity for granted. Not because we were able to  put planets in controlled conditions in a laboratory, but because we could come up with other ways to test the theory. The theory had a great explanatory and predictive power. We could explain the circular orbit of the moon, tides and host of other phenomena. When Uranus was found to have an irregular orbit, scientists could use the theory of universal gravitation to predict the existence of another planet and sure enough Neptune was discovered.

 

When Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution, he based it on the observation that organisms inherit characteristics from their parents and yet they also vary sufficiently from their parents. He did not know what caused inheritance or variation, and without the mechanisms for these, the theory would have crumbled. The discovery of genes, DNA and mutation confirmed what Darwin had predicted decades earlier.

 

One of the most fascinating instance of the predictive power of the theory of evolution is the discovery of the Tiktaalik and people truly interested should read up on it.

http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/searching4Tik.html

 

Some other fascinating predictions can be found in this link https://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/06/21/predictions-of-evolution/

 

More importantly though, the TOE has tremendous explanatory power. The TOE allows us to "make sense" of the sometimes bizarre phenomena we observe - for example the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, or the blow hole of a whale, or the vestigial legs of snakes. It is because of this that evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said "Nothing in Biology makes sense except in light of evolution". Ironically, Dobzhansky was an Orthodox Christian.

[ChocolateReignRemix]

Wow. Now that is an awesome post.  Thank you for taking the time to write it.

[fraidycat]

Wow. Now that is an awesome post. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

:iagree:

[livetoread]

I would add another point to Free's post specifically about interpretation. YECists often point to individual pieces of information and talk about how they can be interpreted different ways. This might be true, but when trying to get a picture of our world, we have to take into account all the other pieces of information already gathered when we are interpreting.

 

It's kind of like having a puzzle of green pieces and when mostly assembled, they make a picture of a tree. Someone can come along and pull out a piece and say, "Look, it's green. It could also be a part of an iguana." Well yes, but not when you take all the rest of the pieces into consideration.

 

This is where YEC falls down. It can't fit all the pieces into a coherent picture without twisting and distorting them way beyond the bounds of science (for example casting aspirations on any method that reveals information inconvenient to their picture), and so it has to content itself with pulling out individual pieces and trying to argue that they could be part of something else. If they want to deny the tree and make an iguana, then they need to do it, using all the pieces. They can't, and this is part of why the interpretation argument ultimately doesn't fly.

[SunnyDays]

Dang it, I'm out of likes.  Again.  But I just wanted to say thanks for all the interesting links on this thread.  For a "chat" board, I learn an amazing amount here from all of you!  :)

 

 

 

[acreecav]

Yes, thank you to Free--you've done a great job articulating one of the misconceptions I encounter in my family--that old earth and evolution are just "speculation" and not "real science," because they had no eyewitnesses and can't be "tested" (says my brother).

 

As you say, testing doesn't just happen in a test tube, and crimes are solved routinely even without eyewitnesses.  We believe criminals can and should be convicted, sometimes even put to death--if there's enough evidence pointing toward a particular person, even if no one directly observed the crime and can't repeat it in a lab.  What can be recreated is a model of what happened, and if all the evidence fits the model, without too many glaring holes ("beyond a shadow of a doubt"), the crime is considered solved.

 

When a scientific hypothesis is proposed, it's tested by seeing if its predictions correspond to other evidence.  As successful predictions pile up, the hypothesis graduates to the status of a Theory, which means it has no counterevidence to disprove it.  All evidence points toward the Theory, not away.  Even though there were no eyewitnesses, there's not a shadow of a doubt about it. The hypothesis that all the continents were once a single land mass was based on the observation that from a God's eye view they look like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Obviously, this scenario can't be recreated, but it led to the prediction that the rock formations at the eastern edge of South America and the western edge of Africa should match each other.  Sure enough, they do. The hypothesis that India broke off from southeast Africa and is still moving toward China led to the prediction that the Himalayas will keep getting higher as the tectonic plates keep crunching into each other.  Even within the timeframe since accurate measurements have been possible, the HImalayas have grown taller. Many other geological predictions have also been borne out.

 

The great thing about the testability of old earth and evolutionary Theory is that it makes studying science a blast.  In my YEC years, I shied away from science because it seemed full of stories that I had to untell in my mind.  Without the stories--that is, the explanations of how things happened--YEC science is frankly pretty boring, because the answer to every question of How is, "because God made it that way."  Now I feel like a thirsty traveler who's found the way out of the desert into a dazzling landscape full of springs and waterfalls.  Fascinating stories about *how* God created the universe are everywhere, and they only increase my faith and awe.

 

The difference between young earth people in the 17th and 18th centuries and young earth people of today is that the earlier ones weren't reading books about geology (there weren't any), they were actually climbing on the rocks, digging up the fossils, examining the places where orange sedimentary layers are tilted on top of gray sedimentary layers turned on their side (see Siccar Point, eg), or where liquid rock had intruded between sedimentary layers, tearing and pushing chunks of sedimentary rock as it went (see Salisbury Crags, eg.)  Although they assumed the earth was young and expected it to be so, they could see with their own eyes that such "unconformities" could not have happened in a single flood or in the timeframe they'd allowed for.  With their noses in the evidence, they reached the inevitable conclusion that the earth is very old and has been through many dramatic changes.  Modern YECs like to talk (as I did) about the Grand Canyon, where all the layers are level, but there's a lot more out there that needs explaining.  When I read posts in other threads claiming that photos in geology texts have been photoshopped, I want to say, "Go and stand on it yourself." Or pray that your kids don't grow up to work in the oil industry or to drive through any mountains, where roadcuts reveal the tilting of rock layers that couldn't have happened in a flood.

 

Science reveals God's marvelous handiwork, and none of its findings are news to God.  We don't need to fear.