Dinosaurs and the Flood

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NSmith said:
If you read my post then you should understand that it is not required to view the Old Testament in the manner you describe, and that more intelligent men than either of us have quibbled over the age of the Earth for thousands of years.
The time frame in the Bible could very well be thousands of years more ancient than what you propose and it would not be outlandish in the Jewish tradition.
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The entire thread boils down to “should we take the Bible literally.” Ive pointed out why we cant. I’m not saying a flood didn’t happen or Noah for that matter.

I’m saying YEC and 6 thousand year old earth makes no sense.
 
I understand, and my point is that taking the Bible literally doesn’t necessarily equate to YEC. There are good reasons from an exegetical perspective to understand the accounts more flexibly.
 
NSmith said:
In general my objection to the evolutionary hypothesis as it pertains to the origin of complex organisms is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics, that is to say that more complex things are spontaneously generating from less complex things, which is a decrease in the entropy of the system. This should not be possible unless it can be demonstrated that it is not a closed system, which implies some outside (name removed by moderator)ut into the system.
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I nominate the sun as the outside (name removed by moderator)utter.
 
nicholasG said:
Easy, it’s on the web, do the research.
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It’s easy. NS and RM can do it. ROTFL

Each step must have a survival advantage. How many steps to make a ribosome and how it gets fixed in the population?
 
It is not very relevant to consider the sun, because the sun itself is dispersing its energy, that is to say the entropy of the sun is increasing, which is why it will eventually die. The earth in the same way disperses its energy, and will eventually die. So neither the sun nor the earth are creating anything, but instead descending into less concentrated forms of energy, less ordered.
The mutation of DNA on the whole also takes this character, wherein it is not increasing the information contained in the creature but decreasing it, which is consistent with thermodynamics. However the improvements necessary for evolutionary theory are not characterized by the loss of information, quite the opposite the claim is made that the organisms today originated from single-celled life forms and are orders of magnitude more complex than our supposed ancestors. I propose that such development as a natural process is impossible because it violates natural laws. It could have been the result of intelligent action, however.
 
I think that from Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, which are the relevant genealogies since we know that there can only be at most 2100 years from Abraham to Christ, we can observe that both lists contain 10 names, and that both of them end with a patriarch that has 3 significant sons. This is not surprising if we consider that in the time of Adam and Noah there was likely very limited forms of writing, and so the transmission of their histories was done through oral methods. In oral traditions it is very common that important accounts are set to verse or that the number of significant events is limited to a small number, so that there is not a risk of inserting new historical figures or forgetting old ones.
Based on this observation, it is certainly likely that there are gaps in the genealogies. There are gaps in other Biblical genealogies as well. However, none of the other gaps exceed a thousand years in length, and the gaps appear infrequently. Considering that later genealogies have the benefit of a written historical tradition, I think that it is likely that as much as ten to twenty thousand years could be omitted from the timeline in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11. But hundreds of thousands of years is beginning to reach the limits of the Biblical texts, because it is far in excess of any other gap in any other genealogy.
 
vsedriver said:
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phil19034:
We might be 99% sure, but we can never be 100% sure
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99% is sufficient for me to accept that dinosaurs existed long before man and that man never interacted with them as living creatures. The rest is just fanciful speculation.

YMMV
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What about the Flintstones though?
 
puer.dei said:
But we here in the U.S. are special. :crazy_face:
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There is an Evangelical infection in some small factions of the Church here in the US.

It’s really strange and a little embarrassing.
 
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Feanor2 said:
There is an Evangelical infection in some small factions of the Church here in the US.
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It’s also tied into the multi-generational anti-intellectual current in American society. Rejecting scientific evidence and substituting our own “common sense” or “research” that does nothing but confirm everything we already believe is a perfect example of anti-intellectualism.

Many Americans are deeply afraid to intellectually challenge themselves. They often see diversity of thought, or ideas that disagree with their own, as a challenge to their very existence.

I don’t know why this problem exists, and I don’t know how to solve it. Nor do I know how prolific it is in other cultures. But I do know it is a big problem in the US. It is on full display on this website (and this thread!) everyday.
 
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I think you have a valid point, however, I also think that, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis from the Abolition of Man,
There is a trend in our time to limit the scope of what is “real” to what can be eminently observed by men, and to treat any claim that is not “empirical” as being without truth. But to accept this as our definition of “intellectual” is in actual fact an insult to the Truth, and creates men that have neither intellect nor virtue, because they have separated their minds from their soul.
In my opinion the problem you’ve described exists because of a concerted effort in society to consign the supernatural to the realm of fiction. Many in the US are not materialists, even if they are not religious. As a result they oppose what they perceive is a trend that is attacking a fundamental aspect of their identity, which is their belief in things that cannot be observed or explained. I am not merely speaking of God or of ghosts here, but also in such things as honor, love, hatred, and justice.
 
NSmith said:
In my opinion the problem you’ve described exists because of a concerted effort in society to consign the supernatural to the realm of fiction.
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I think you incorrectly read that into my comments.

Some of the best intellectuals I know and work with are men and women of deep faith who study theology and other related pursuits. Just because people demand evidence and seek to follow that evidence is in no way a rejection of theology.

God gave us reason for, well, a reason. I’m fairly certain he expects us to use it, and to use it to its fullest extent. No one here wants to “consign the supernatural to the realm of fiction” by following evidence to establish an accurate age of the Earth.

On the other hand, there clearly are several posters who are trying to consign scientific inquiry to the bin of quackery because it dates the world differently than people who read Genesis as a literal work of natural history.
 
NSmith said:
It is not very relevant to consider the sun, because the sun itself is dispersing its energy, that is to say the entropy of the sun is increasing, which is why it will eventually die.
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Indeed. And luckily for us one of the places to which it is dispersing its energy is the Earth. That is the energy (name removed by moderator)ut you seek.
 
NSmith said:
In general my objection to the evolutionary hypothesis as it pertains to the origin of complex organisms is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics, that is to say that more complex things are spontaneously generating from less complex things, which is a decrease in the entropy of the system. This should not be possible unless it can be demonstrated that it is not a closed system, which implies some outside (name removed by moderator)ut into the system. But even in that case, there is always a corresponding increase in the entropy of another system related to the one that has decreased, because the entropy of the universe itself, which is a closed system, can never decrease.
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Life is woven out of just 30 or so different molecules, constructed from some of the most abundant elements in the universe: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. The beginnings of life is, a matter of biology, not physics.
 
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