Do evangelicals really believe that humans are only 6000 years old?

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JimG said:
I have no problem with that. Are these cities whose occupants recorded their history, or were entire cities wholly non-literate?
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Define literate…

… after all, there are some abstract symbols amidst the paintings in Lascaux. We don’t know if they are meaningful, decorative, or both.

Many of the early sites (like the 6000BCE Harrapans) have obvious symbology that is undeciphered.

And the Inca used quipu (knotted strings) as memory aids, but generally didn’t write.
 
benjohnson said:
Ok… be gentle with me. 🙂

Lutherans are officially “young-earth” - if God reveals it to us, then we are to believe it.

The trouble is that I’m a scientist.

So here’s how I reconcile the two viewpoints: What God has revealed is from His perspective. For example one day of His creation could take millions of our years. Or that God gave some of His evolved primitive monkeys a special soul that is in His image.

So rather than discount what God has told me, I need to expand my creativity in making a sensible and rational fit.

Another realization is that this world we experience with our own limited minds is the impostor world - the world “under the sun.”

It’s God’s world, that he reveals to us, that will endure.
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You’re ij good company–St Augustine of Hippo also believed that the “days” of God might have been a different length from our 24-hour days 🙂
 
PaulDupre1 said:
Archaeologists have discovered cities that are 14,000 years old. Recently in England they discovered human footprints that are 80,000 years old. Previously, scientists thought that any human beings before 50,000 years ago only existed in Africa.

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Do you have a source of information for a 14,000 year-old city?

The recent footprint discovery in England was dated to 800,000 years ago and not 80,000 years ago and they weren’t modern humans, i.e. homo sapiens sapiens. (source)

According to this article, some modern humans may have left Africa as early as 125,000 years ago.
 
cornbread_r2 said:
Do you have a source of information for a 14,000 year-old city?

The recent footprint discovery in England was dated to 800,000 years ago and not 80,000 years ago and they weren’t modern humans, i.e. homo sapiens sapiens. (source)

According to this article, some modern humans may have left Africa as early as 125,000 years ago.
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Videos claiming “About 12000 years old” for Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

youtube.com/watch?v=TZ0ViMVxKZA History Channel (dubious)
youtube.com/watch?v=8JfbV21weQE Nat Geo. (Semi-credible)

And a Wiki link:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
Included primarily for the extensive references.

The Nat Geo vid mentions the site being 300x300m. It also gives 11,500 years as the age.

By modern standards, not a “city”- but a large village or small town. Still, it’s monumental architecture. I’m curious to know the dating technique.
 
Aramis said:
Videos claiming “About 12000 years old” for Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

youtube.com/watch?v=TZ0ViMVxKZA History Channel (dubious)
youtube.com/watch?v=8JfbV21weQE Nat Geo. (Semi-credible)

And a Wiki link:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
Included primarily for the extensive references.

The Nat Geo vid mentions the site being 300x300m. It also gives 11,500 years as the age.

By modern standards, not a “city”- but a large village or small town. Still, it’s monumental architecture. I’m curious to know the dating technique.
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I started a thread on Gobekli Tepe here some time ago. As I understand it, it was more of a monument than any kind of village or town as it was only inhabited while the artisans worked on it, seasonally.
 
JamesCollins said:
One of the things that surprises me is the idea that with all we know about science that many evangelicals reject the idea that men have been around longer than 6000 years. It seems that anyone with a middle school education is aware that human beings came into existence tens of thousands of years ago and evolved from lower life forms.
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Many do (especially the church I went to) but not all do…I think the term is 6-day creationist.
 
Not all evangelicals believe this. My dad actually owned a study Bible known as the Dake Bible. I would read it in church on Sundays and Wednesday nights as a kid because, oddly enough, I preferred reading study Bible notes than simply zoning out the sermon like I’m sure many other people did. 😃

Anyway, one thing I remember is that in Genesis the author of the study Bible posited that there was quite a lot of time that separated Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 from each other. The formless, void and dark state of the earth, it was suggested, was the result of a previous cataclysm and divine judgment upon the inhabitants of the earth–the details of which were not entirely known.
 
sallybutler said:
Unfortunately, 1 in 4 do not realize that the earth goes around the sun.
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There are many things that are much more unfortunate than that such as the number of homeless or illiterate people in the world. Belief or doubt in the earth revolving around the sun is relatively trivial. Much like what one believes about the age of the earth, it has no practical application in most people’s everyday life other than feeling superior and looking down on those who don’t believe it.
 
JamesCollins said:
One of the things that surprises me is the idea that with all we know about science that many evangelicals reject the idea that men have been around longer than 6000 years. It seems that anyone with a middle school education is aware that human beings came into existence tens of thousands of years ago and evolved from lower life forms.
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does it require more faith to put God into a scientific worldview or to embrace an (on the whole) scientific ungodly explanation of creation?
 
dronald said:
It requires logic to accept what’s proven.
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Logic and common sense are more rare than hen’s teeth or 5th friday in a month.

Sadly, science requires as much faith now as Religious faith requires - because so much now is so technical that it’s unable to be tested by those outside the profession.

I mean, after all, knowing that a proton is two ups and a down, a neutron two downs and an up (quark types, by the by), it’s neither terribly important to 99.99% of scientists, nor testable with anything short of a multi-billion dollar atom smasher, and even then, it’s a mathematical model that fits the data and predicts the data, but some predicted data hasn’t been replicated in experiments yet…

We have this problem: Science is too technical for the average layman to test, at least, much past 10th grade stuff. Most stuff past that is “take it on faith and work the equations if you can, at least until you get your PhD…”
 
I’m not dogmatic on the age of the earth, but lean YEC. I quite enjoy science, and aced all my science courses in college… and every course I took in college for that matter, including grad school, all at secular, public colleges. Why do I say that? Because there is an odd belief that anyone that is YEC or leans YEC must be dim.
 
Aramis said:
Logic and common sense are more rare than hen’s teeth or 5th friday in a month.

Sadly, science requires as much faith now as Religious faith requires - because so much now is so technical that it’s unable to be tested by those outside the profession.

I mean, after all, knowing that a proton is two ups and a down, a neutron two downs and an up (quark types, by the by), it’s neither terribly important to 99.99% of scientists, nor testable with anything short of a multi-billion dollar atom smasher, and even then, it’s a mathematical model that fits the data and predicts the data, but some predicted data hasn’t been replicated in experiments yet…

We have this problem: Science is too technical for the average layman to test, at least, much past 10th grade stuff. Most stuff past that is “take it on faith and work the equations if you can, at least until you get your PhD…”
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Don’t you think if Scientists were consistently coming to the conclusion of YEC they would report such findings?
 
dronald said:
Don’t you think if Scientists were consistently coming to the conclusion of YEC they would report such findings?
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It’s pretty close to career suicide, so no, none who value their credibility.
 
Aramis said:
It’s pretty close to career suicide, so no, none who value their credibility.
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This is true even in the case of those backing the Intelligent Design Theory, regardless of their religion or how old they think the universe is. 😦
 
JamesCollins;
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It seems that anyone with a middle school education is aware that human beings came into existence tens of thousands of years ago and evolved from lower life forms
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The first sentence in the Bible states; that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, this is not open for negotiation. I am also happy, that God created man in his own image, and man did not evolve from any lower life form.
 
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