Old Earth Debate: Need Arguments and Resources

[Janitor]

In the pre-human era of your Earth, I take it there was imperfection, such as suffering of animals.

So a question is, are humans the only creatures on Earth that God is interested in being worshiped by? Did God get by for millions of years without anything on Earth worshiping and loving him? If there were millions of years, prior to Adam and Eve, of zebras and giraffes and tigers and cockroaches and mice and so on, was all the pain they collectively racked up truly necessary just so that sometime later God could make non-robotic humans to worship him?

For the sake of argument, could we assume for a moment that there was 100 million years of animal life suffering, and for this 100 million years there was nothing on the planet that was actually loving God? And then there was 25,000 more years of suffering of animals and now suffering of humans as well, but at least during this era there was one species on Earth (out of millions of species!) that sometimes managed to worship the right God?

And given what preachers like to say about "the end time is drawing near," can we take it that there won't be more than another 1,000 years of existence for the earth?

In this "model" of Earth, there are then more than 100 million years of suffering without God getting any return on His investment, so to speak, followed by a relatively paltry 26,000 years or less of Him getting non-robotically loved, at least by the "few" that the Bible says manage to find "the narrow path."

 

[BoulderHead]

Originally Posted by Janitor;
My point is that the murdering done by carnivores and parasites is not particularly puzzling if today's biosphere is the result of amoral evolution. But Creationists always believe in the existence of some deity which came before life on Earth, a deity which presumably would continue to be interested in the welfare of living things on Earth and wouldn't just wash His/Her/Its hands of things and walk away at some point after creating life, let alone design a murder instinct into it right from the start.

Originally Posted by russ_watters;
Interesting idea: if God created the animals, why aren't they all herbivores? I'd never considered that.

To both of you; the answer involves knowing the Bible. If you are debating someone who has more than just a cursory knowledge of the Bible you will be on the receiving end of a beating in short time if you use an argument this weak. The reason is that the original creation was vegetarian. This, incidentally is something occultists have understood for a very long time even while many Christians living today still do not.

Genesis 1:29
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

The Hebrew word translated to meat was ‘oklah, which means food, but even without that little morsel it is plain enough in verse 30 to see even the animals were vegetarian.

Meat eating didn’t arrive until Noah’s time;

Genesis 9:3
And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

There are better arguments to use than this.

 

[Janitor]

Does the Bible say when the carnivores got their fangs and the scorpions their stingers, as well as when each of these creatures lost their ruminant stomachs?

 

[BoulderHead]

Hehe, I was going to recommend a different tactic tomorrow. I wanted to run off and post in the 'fun' threads which lively up my spirits.

 

[russ_watters]

Oochy - I'm curious...
How do you reconcile the Garden of Eden story with an old Earth? Billions of years of lost human history? The Garden created long after the Earth was? A varying flow of time?

My personal view is pretty simple: First, if God created the universe, He (She?) also created time. As such, any mention of time in the creation story is meaningless and a human construct to explain something no human at the time had any understanding of. Heck, even if he got a vision directly from God, God wouldn't have been able to impart all of evolution and cosmology on the writer of Genesis. Humans at the time just didn't have the tools necessary to process such information. The story was sufficient for several thousand years, and that was good enough.

For someone who'se beliefs require literal interpretation of the Bible, this idea is obviously a deal-breaker. Tougher to understand (to me) are the vast majority of people who understand that the Bible was written by scientifically illiterate men, yet still try to interpret it literally as much as possible. I don't believe it has to be that way.

 

[russ_watters]

To both of you; the answer involves knowing the Bible. If you are debating someone who has more than just a cursory knowledge of the Bible you will be on the receiving end of a beating in short time if you use an argument this weak. The reason is that the original creation was vegetarian. This, incidentally is something occultists have understood for a very long time even while many Christians living today still do not.

Ok, maybe that's what was meant by those lines (quite frankly, given what I said in my last post, that's pretty thin), but that still has a lot of problems associated with it: when and how did carnivores arise? When and how did humans get the ability to eat meat? Why do we have incisors? One stomach? Was Jesus a vegitarian (likely no, since he ate fish and had fishermen as disciples)?

 

[BoulderHead]

Ok, maybe that's what was meant by those lines (quite frankly, given what I said in my last post, that's pretty thin)…

It may seem pretty thin to you, but it’s important to see that much of what you said in that last post is simply your opinion, not the words in the Bible.

..but that still has a lot of problems associated with it: when and how did carnivores arise? When and how did humans get the ability to eat meat? Why do we have incisors? One stomach?

Of course it leaves other problems (I never said it didn’t). My point is clearly laid out in my original post. That argument I warned against will put the speaker on the defensive and possibly make him/her appear foolish. From that position an attempt to regain lost ground is made by countering with the very same questions you ask above.

Was Jesus a vegitarian (likely no, since he ate fish and had fishermen as disciples)?

A likely counter to this; Jesus came after the time of Noah.

 

[Janitor]

I was jawing back and forth with Oochy in this thread, on the subject of animal suffering and the history of life on earth. Today I looked at a USA Today newspaper, and there was an article which made mention of 70+ million year old ammonite fossils found in Canada. One was said to have marks from a dinosaur biting it. Now that had to be painful, if the teeth managed to puncture the shell.

 

[loseyourname]

My personal view is pretty simple: First, if God created the universe, He (She?) also created time. As such, any mention of time in the creation story is meaningless and a human construct to explain something no human at the time had any understanding of. Heck, even if he got a vision directly from God, God wouldn't have been able to impart all of evolution and cosmology on the writer of Genesis. Humans at the time just didn't have the tools necessary to process such information. The story was sufficient for several thousand years, and that was good enough.

For someone who'se beliefs require literal interpretation of the Bible, this idea is obviously a deal-breaker. Tougher to understand (to me) are the vast majority of people who understand that the Bible was written by scientifically illiterate men, yet still try to interpret it literally as much as possible. I don't believe it has to be that way.

Has Russ been reading Kenneth Miller?

 

[Loren Booda]

Has anyone here offered the site www.reasons.org? Hugh Ross's method there is to bend scientific observation and theory, including the Big Bang, to suit fundamentalist religious beliefs.

 

[loseyourname]

Someone posted a link to that site from one of these forums. I can't remember which one. Kenneth Miller suggests that quantum indeterminacy is necessary for free will as well as for the freedom of natural events (for example, to keep evolution from being pre-determined). He also tried to argue for the existence of God using fundamental mass and force constants that he says are perfectly calibrated so as to create a universe that would eventually result in the arising of intelligent life.

It's all in Finding Darwin's God. It's still a lot of logical fallacy and wishful thinking, but it's a lot better than all the creationist literature and at least he understands science - well, biology anyway.

 

[Phobos]

His discussions on evolution seem excellent. And in his frequent public debates with Creationists, he doesn't discuss his evidences for God (at least, as far as I have seen from what is available in his book & on the internet).

I'd say that Kenneth Miller is a good scientist...as opposed to Hugh Ross who has a decent understanding of scientific ideas but then inserts many leaps of faith. (Which is fine for a personal philosophy, but not for scientific theories.)

 

[Janitor]

There was a brief item in the paper a day or two ago about a stone tool and a piece of homonid (terminology?) skull that have been found. I can't remember for sure the age that they are believed to be, but it may have been 900,000 years. Does anybody know more about this?

 

[loseyourname]

I'd say that Kenneth Miller is a good scientist...as opposed to Hugh Ross who has a decent understanding of scientific ideas but then inserts many leaps of faith. (Which is fine for a personal philosophy, but not for scientific theories.)

Miller is an excellent scientist. He keeps his religious beliefs where they belong. Ross and Behe and Eden and guys like that are a completely different story.

 

[Loren Booda]

Does the Gaia hypothesis fit between the old and new Earth theories?

 

[Janitor]

I tuned into Christian radio for a few minutes this morning. The program was Hank Hanegraaff, "The Bible Answer Man," who is president of the Christian Research Institute (CRI)... The Moon is just the right mass to form some tides on Earth, but not to make really huge tides. Only a caring God could have arranged this...

... Why a creationist should be so concerned with tides, I don't know, and Hank did not say why. Isn't it evolutionists who suggest tidal pools as a good environment for getting life started? ...

Well, I stumbled upon this website

http://www.sivanandadlshq.org/messages/sciblgod.htm

which contains this:

... If our moon were, say, only 50,000 miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides might be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains could soon be eroded away...

So that must have been what Hanegraaff was referring to.

My response would be to point out that there likely are places in the universe where tides do in fact create enough havoc for a few hundred million years to prevent terrestrial life from making an appearance. Would Mr. Hanegraaff blame his deity for making some places in the universe unnecessarily harsh, I wonder?

 

[Andre]

Well, since the moon is receding about something like an inch a year, the distance between Earth and moon may have been reduced quite a bit 20-30% ROM in the past, I would say according to my old envellope. Tides may have been double the size of now.

But we need the moon to keep the Earth stable. If Venus had had a moon like Earth it may also have had life.

Reading that paper I realize that there are two worlds. A created Earth and a "evolved" Earth. I don't think it is doable to merge them together into one world. We just have to live with that.

 

[Kakarot]

Well I like debating this subject and I came up with an argument in support for an old universe/earth. If the universe/earth is a mere 6000 years old then how is it possible for us to see galaxies millions of light years away with telescopes? We couldn't, they would be invisible to us because their light would take longer than the age of the universe to reach us! A creationist might argue that god willed it to be this way, or that this is a deception from satan.

 

[Andre]

Actually there are two worlds, one of 4,6 billion years old and another one of 6000 years. The first world is sure of this because they have a dozen independent techniques to calculate that age. The 6000 years old world is sure of it too, because somebody who can know it, says so.

Somehow those two worlds got merged, I don't know, a peculiar worm hole or so. Now we are ended up with intermingled people of two worlds whose main objective seems to be to convince the others of their truth.

This is tragical, since none of those parties will ever succeed because there are two worlds.

 

[Kakarot]

 

[Tom McCurdy]

Actually there are two worlds, one of 4,6 billion years old and another one of 6000 years. The first world is sure of this because they have a dozen independent techniques to calculate that age. The 6000 years old world is sure of it too, because somebody who can know it, says so.

Somehow those two worlds got merged, I don't know, a peculiar worm hole or so. Now we are ended up with intermingled people of two worlds whose main objective seems to be to convince the others of their truth.

This is tragical, since none of those parties will ever succeed because there are two worlds.

perfectly stated.

 

[lnx990]

well, there is another aspect to this. somewhere in the bible there is a story about Jesus turning water into wine, not just wine but good wine. This implies that it is old, so the argument would be something to the general effect of "well, obviously if God can create good/old wine why couldent he create an earth/universe that appears old?" scientifically there is a flaw in this argument. if you subscribe to that you must also believe that man, at one point, walked with dinosaurs. Some creationists would explain that God simply created the world with fossils already in it. The problem is that death didnt come until the fall of man, that is there was no death up until that point. Thus there was no such thing as death, fossils, natural resources, etc...

...just something to think about...