Again, the question isn't what CAN He do; but what DID He do?
And there is evidence that He can love you, Mrs. LPW.
Knowledge of this love is an important part of having faith in God (Hebrews 11:6). A person has to know that God loves them, probably in order to be saved. But attaching "Flood Geology" and all of its attendants to the Gospel just weighs it down.
How can I convince someone that God really does love them when they see that I've been deceitful about the natural history of the earth? Neither I nor the "god" that I'm trying to peddle in this circumstance are worthy of trust.
How can they say they trust God Whom they haven't seen, if they can't trust the Christians they have seen?
Their trust shouldn't be in Christians, it should be in God and his Word. How can someone believe in the God you speak about if they can't trust his Word regarding the creation? Science is a shakey foundation because a discovery might be made tomorrow that throws a commonly accepted theory on it's head and then a new theory replaces the old. How can one believe in the atonement if Jesus didn't rise from the dead? If you claim that Jesus rose from the dead we know then that God doesn't operate according to the laws of science therefore science is inadequate to explain God or to explain what God has done. At the end of the day God's Word will stand as being the truth...even if you can't explain it scientifically.
Again, the question isn't what CAN He do; but what DID He do?
And there is evidence that He can love you, Mrs. LPW.
Knowledge of this love is an important part of having faith in God (Hebrews 11:6). A person has to know that God loves them, probably in order to be saved. But attaching "Flood Geology" and all of its attendants to the Gospel just weighs it down.
How can I convince someone that God really does love them when they see that I've been deceitful about the natural history of the earth? Neither I nor the "god" that I'm trying to peddle in this circumstance are worthy of trust.
How can they say they trust God Whom they haven't seen, if they can't trust the Christians they have seen?
__________________ Mrs. LPW
Psalm 19:14
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
Their trust shouldn't be in Christians, it should be in God and his Word. How can someone believe in the God you speak about if they can't trust his Word regarding the creation? Science is a shakey foundation because a discovery might be made tomorrow that throws a commonly accepted theory on it's head and then a new theory replaces the old. How can one believe in the atonement if Jesus didn't rise from the dead? If you claim that Jesus rose from the dead we know then that God doesn't operate according to the laws of science therefore science is inadequate to explain God or to explain what God has done. At the end of the day God's Word will stand as being the truth...even if you can't explain it scientifically.
__________________ Mrs. LPW
Psalm 19:14
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
Their trust shouldn't be in Christians, it should be in God and his Word. How can someone believe in the God you speak about if they can't trust his Word regarding the creation? Science is a shakey foundation because a discovery might be made tomorrow that throws a commonly accepted theory on it's head and then a new theory replaces the old. How can one believe in the atonement if Jesus didn't rise from the dead? If you claim that Jesus rose from the dead we know then that God doesn't operate according to the laws of science therefore science is inadequate to explain God or to explain what God has done. At the end of the day God's Word will stand as being the truth...even if you can't explain it scientifically.
So, Science is a shaky foundation? What about outlandish claims of Religious origin? What about the denominal World of Christianity? Who do we trust? How can we trust a system that is floundering in debate, unable to conclude "A Faith" that will unite us all? We claim to have Love and understanding, but within we are cancered by dramatical interpretations that leave people distanced from the Almighty, distanced from each other, and empty with confusion!
Church today is a complicated maze, everyone coming to a conclusion about God through a Book that can say what we want it to say. Salvation has become a million opinions, a million ideas, and the claim of who is right remains a mystery. Why? Because we can’t go to the place where we can confirm, “Who is Right?” So, we continue to drink from the well of maybes. We tell people, “You just need more Faith”. We keep praying for a healing that never comes. We give people hopes and promises that never come to pass. We place our finger upon a prophecy, as the years pour by without confirmation. We cover our lies, and we blanket the Truth with another "Work Around", instead of just admitting Science has proved us wrong.
You of all people know, Religion has carried off people and burned them at the stake in the name of God. Religion has put people in prison, calling them heretics, banishing the honest as backslidden or evil because they've proven error amongst the hierarchy of Faith. Elders denounce those who step forward to ask “Why”, demanding obedience to those who have a direct line to a divine revelation that lives in a Spectral World that cannot be measured.
Science has brought accountability to the "Unseen" World, where manipulation has taken advantage of the weak or unlearned. In Centuries gone by, people had to accept dogmas of Religion because they couldn't prove otherwise. Today, the light of Truth regarding our Planet, Solar System, the human body, Nature, Weather, and a host of other scientific discovery has blessed the ignorant with the power of knowledge. This my friend, is a blessing! The God of Ages conforms to His Creation because His breath is seen upon waves of the sea, and His Crown rests upon the highest mountain! We are created in His Image, and my heart confirms His Eternal Godhead by the things that are MADE, not by the things we make up!
I am without excuse when I open my heart to the very Handiwork that is signed by the Greatest Artist, EVER! God made this Earth, and His Glory and Power become more evident when we lift the veil, and SEE the Truth! Real Truth! Its men like Galileo who let God out of Prison! He went past the Ball and Chain of an Unseen World, to confirm, to validate, to show the World of Religion, you're WRONG!
Chris, maybe a flat Earth is OK with you, or you feel that greater Truth will offend the dogmas of our Age that bind, but my Faith in God becomes greater when unseen things are proven, and that includes the false ideas I once embraced.
Last edited by NotforSale; 03-30-2010 at 04:50 PM.
Reason: Added text
Their trust shouldn't be in Christians, it should be in God and his Word. How can someone believe in the God you speak about if they can't trust his Word regarding the creation?
When YOUR account of the creation and etc. clearly run counter to very real and plain evidence of what I have seen with my eyes and handled with my own hands, then I simply cannot trust you.
Fortunately, I happen to also already have a relationship with the Creator - so my faith isn't shaken by your admittedly "wild" speculations concerning origins and the flood of Genesis 6. But what about a child or a young person? What about an adult who is only at the point of considering the claims of the Gospel?
When we add to the miraculous nature of our common salvation stuff that clearly and simply didn't happen we hinder people's faith.
AND NOTICE: I didn't say "stuff that could not have happened." I said, "stuff that clearly and simply did not happen."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquila
Science is a shakey foundation because a discovery might be made tomorrow that throws a commonly accepted theory on it's head and then a new theory replaces the old. How can one believe in the atonement if Jesus didn't rise from the dead? If you claim that Jesus rose from the dead we know then that God doesn't operate according to the laws of science therefore science is inadequate to explain God or to explain what God has done. At the end of the day God's Word will stand as being the truth...even if you can't explain it scientifically.
For you, "science" appears to be some sort of voodoo magic. This tells me that you haven't had any real practical training or experience with hands on science projects.
How do you know that an atom exists? How do you know that (just to choose one type of atom) the vast, vast majority of hydrogen atoms contain a single electron and a single proton? Just one electron.
How do you know when you've uncovered that rare, "one in a billion," hydrogen atom that has an extra neutron? Or, that one in a trillion that has two extra neutrons? How do you know when you have any atomic isotopes? How can you just trust some guy in a lab coat to tell you, "Yup! Them there's "heavy hydrogen."
How can we trust that guy? Atoms are so small. Nobody's even seen a hydrogen atom before - we've "imaged" much larger atoms - but we just have to take the scientist's word that what were looking at is a picture of an atom.
And yet, if the Iranians were to announce tomorrow that they had 80 kilos of enriched weapons grade uranium isotopes... would you believe them? If they blew up Tel Aviv and Riyadh, would you believe them?
You believe "science" when it comes to keeping your underarms dry. You believe "science" when a local announcement goes out that everyone in a particular community must boil their water. You seem to pick and choose your science carefully, but you don't seem to have much real world experience with science.
Science is a shakey foundation because a discovery might be made tomorrow that throws a commonly accepted theory on it's head and then a new theory replaces the old. How can one believe in the atonement if Jesus didn't rise from the dead? If you claim that Jesus rose from the dead we know then that God doesn't operate according to the laws of science therefore science is inadequate to explain God or to explain what God has done. At the end of the day God's Word will stand as being the truth...even if you can't explain it scientifically.
Concerning the age of the earth - I can test that and see what it is.
Concerning the idea that there was a flood that covered the continents just 4,000 years ago, I can test that too.
Concerning the claim that a single human being rose from the dead 2,000 years ago? That's a lot harder. I can look for eyewitnesses, and in this case we find many reports - even from the foes of Christianity.
It is more than reasonable to conclude that Jesus of Nazareth really did exist (despite the desperate claims of a few to the contrary); but how can I "prove scientifically" whether or not He rose from the dead? I can't test nor prove it scientifically one way or the other.
So the rather constant refrain that keeps pooping up here demanding that we MUST attach a "literal flood" and a "literal 6,000 year old earth" to faith in the resurrection in Jesus Christ just doesn't wash. It's a red herring. Apples and oranges.
Hugh Ross, RTB president, and Jason Lisle from Answers in Genesis discuss the age of the earth on a special one-hour segment of the Frank Pastore Show. Listen live online at www.kkla.com.
Greater Los Angeles area residents can also hear it on radio station 99.5 FM KKLA.
I look at it like this... if we had a time machine and traveled back to the garden of Eden we'd see two adults (Adam and Eve). Upon looking at them, we'd assume they were perhaps in their mid 20's. Yet they might not be 24 hours old. We'd spy a river running through the garden and measure erosion rates and conclude that the river was many years old. Yet it may not have existed the week before. Creation by it's very nature has an appearance of age.
The appearance of age argument doesn't explain all the fossils of species that aren't on earth today that apprear to be millions of years old. By the way, I can accept that many things were created mature because it was necessary (for example man and woman would have died as babies)... but fossils that appear to be millions of years old of species that are not around today were not necessary for a functioning earth. So why are such fossils here? It must be to confirm the truth that evolution is a mechanism that God created inherent within life on earth. That is really the only explanation that is left.
In which case why not just take the simpler explanation that God created everything using that mechanism of evolution instead of creating everything to appear exactly like that mechanism had been used?
I look at it like this... if we had a time machine and traveled back to the garden of Eden we'd see two adults (Adam and Eve). Upon looking at them, we'd assume they were perhaps in their mid 20's. Yet they might not be 24 hours old. We'd spy a river running through the garden and measure erosion rates and conclude that the river was many years old. Yet it may not have existed the week before. Creation by it's very nature has an appearance of age.
The creation by it's very nature shows that it has gone through time.
What if we were to step out of that time machine and "carded" the two naked love birds in the Garden? What if they then pulled out (from where, I dunno) a couple of Driver's Licenses that showed them to be "mid 20's" as you propose? Or would those documents declare their age to be just a few days (however many by the time we go there)?
The only "documents" that we'd have to actually date their ages would be their bodies themselves.
Did the "two adults" have freckles? Wisdom teeth? Did they have belly buttons? Scars? Were the plates of their craniums fused? Our hair sample: did it show you what Eve had been eating a month before she was created? What about Adam's?
What was the condition of the telomeres of their DNA? Did it match up with a "mid 20's" adult human being? Or did the DNA show that their cells had been regenerating for only a few days? Was there a series of bacteria colonies in their gut that had lived and died for only a few days - or did you track the genes of the bacteria back over the course of enough generations to equate several years? Twenty-something years?
I know that it sounds like I'm nit-picking - but those are the kinds of things we'd look for to try and determine the age of someone.
Did the trees have rings? The rings are not only evidence of the plant's age, but they provide the structural rigidity needed to support the height of the tree itself. So, in order for the trees to stand up at all the Creator would have had to "give them the appearance of age" and thus deceive us with the appearances. How far would the Creator go with this deception?
Would He actually create the "oldest appearing" rocks and make them to be - sandstones? That's what we have today. The oldest rocks are sedimentary rocks. That's right. They are the apparent debris of even older rocks that no longer exist! Inside the zircon crystals of these rocks - locked up within the very matrix of the mineral crystals themselves (so we know they haven't been contaminated) are uranium atoms that have been literally "ticking" away and marking the passage of some 3.5 billion years.
And, the zircon crystals are smooth - like they were tumbled in water for a long period of time before being laid down as sediments.
Why did the Creator go to such incredible detail just to deceive us about the earth's age?
Why are meteorites from space older than the other rocks found on the surface of the earth? Always. It sure makes it seem like the earth formed from material in space and then that material was molten (resetting the atomic "clocks") and then reformed and eroded and recycled over a very long expanse of time. Meanwhile, the rocks in nearby space occasionally come crashing down and show that they didn't have their "clocks" reset like the earth's crust had been.
Why go to such "nit picking detail" just to make it seem like the earth was old? This is the "moral question" about the appearance of age argument that you and the others have been ducking all along.
For me, I had to ask myself, "Who do you serve? The Creator of heaven and earth (the real heaven and earth that you and I find ourselves a part of right now)? Or do I serve Loki, the 'trickster god?'"
I choose the Creator Who created this world that I find myself in right now. He is my Lord and my God. "Tricksters" beware!
The creation by it's very nature shows that it has gone through time.
What if we were to step out of that time machine and "carded" the two naked love birds in the Garden? What if they then pulled out (from where, I dunno) a couple of Driver's Licenses that showed them to be "mid 20's" as you propose? Or would those documents declare their age to be just a few days (however many by the time we go there)?
The only "documents" that we'd have to actually date their ages would be their bodies themselves.
Did the "two adults" have freckles? Wisdom teeth? Did they have belly buttons? Scars? Were the plates of their craniums fused? Our hair sample: did it show you what Eve had been eating a month before she was created? What about Adam's?
What was the condition of the telomeres of their DNA? Did it match up with a "mid 20's" adult human being? Or did the DNA show that their cells had been regenerating for only a few days? Was there a series of bacteria colonies in their gut that had lived and died for only a few days - or did you track the genes of the bacteria back over the course of enough generations to equate several years? Twenty-something years?
I know that it sounds like I'm nit-picking - but those are the kinds of things we'd look for to try and determine the age of someone.
Did the trees have rings? The rings are not only evidence of the plant's age, but they provide the structural rigidity needed to support the height of the tree itself. So, in order for the trees to stand up at all the Creator would have had to "give them the appearance of age" and thus deceive us with the appearances. How far would the Creator go with this deception?
Would He actually create the "oldest appearing" rocks and make them to be - sandstones? That's what we have today. The oldest rocks are sedimentary rocks. That's right. They are the apparent debris of even older rocks that no longer exist! Inside the zircon crystals of these rocks - locked up within the very matrix of the mineral crystals themselves (so we know they haven't been contaminated) are uranium atoms that have been literally "ticking" away and marking the passage of some 3.5 billion years.
And, the zircon crystals are smooth - like they were tumbled in water for a long period of time before being laid down as sediments.
Why did the Creator go to such incredible detail just to deceive us about the earth's age?
Why are meteorites from space older than the other rocks found on the surface of the earth? Always. It sure makes it seem like the earth formed from material in space and then that material was molten (resetting the atomic "clocks") and then reformed and eroded and recycled over a very long expanse of time. Meanwhile, the rocks in nearby space occasionally come crashing down and show that they didn't have their "clocks" reset like the earth's crust had been.
Why go to such "nit picking detail" just to make it seem like the earth was old? This is the "moral question" about the appearance of age argument that you and the others have been ducking all along.
For me, I had to ask myself, "Who do you serve? The Creator of heaven and earth (the real heaven and earth that you and I find ourselves a part of right now)? Or do I serve Loki, the "trickster god?"
I choose the Creator Who created this world that I find myself in right now. He is my Lord and my God. "Tricksters" beware!
You could go one further Pel. If God created the earth with such a perfectly detailed appearance of age then regardless of how far along that worlds timeline God actually created it, the world that God created would have a history that is 4 billion years old because God created all those historical details of that world.
Yet a world like this could not have a history of a beginning at any time in the past (no big bang) because if it did then God would have also had to create the history of himself creating it in the past. But he couldn't create a true history of himself creating the world in the past because it is impossible for the same world to have two different times of creation.
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