ATTENTION! YOUNG COSMOS HAS MOVED!

Salvador

I just fixed the link to Todd Wood’s paper. Thanks for pointing out my typo!

Sal

What you said about Old-Earthers being cast as attempting to erode belief is something that resonates with me. I think a clear distinction needs to be made between people who are genuinely convinced of an Old Earth position because of what to them appears to be unrefutable scientific knowledge, and people who might be out to deliberately decieve others. I don’t think the majority of Old-Earth theists/Christians, etc. fall into the latter category.

One thing that has been a challenge to my faith has been the suggestion by those in the atheistic corner that “most” true scientists are atheists, or at least agnostics or maybe vaguely deistic (and that those “minority” scientists who are religious are just being irrational, compartmentalizing and refusing to think it through). It has been heartening to hear from a great many scientists (which I have discoved only after dealing with this particular doubt) who are deeply committed Christians and who are fully convinced of the reality of God and Christian doctrine and who are not in the least dissuaded from this by any scientific findings. And this is not mere “compartmentalization,” either, but genuine, bona-fide belief and conviction that they feel is perfectly consistent with their scientific understanding. But many of these bona-fide Christian believing scientists are also Old-Earthers, and some of them are even Theistic Evolutionists. To them the Old-Earth paradigm is inescapable for the reasons you’ve pointed out, but this does not cause them to disbelieve in Christian doctrine. Many of them have come to faith only after having spent much of their lifetime thinking in terms of an old universe, and that question didn’t even have any bearing on their conversion experience. It wasn’t even something they considered at the time of conversion. So to label them as “compromisers,” etc. seems rather over-the-top. I think it is commendable that they have been able to point out that theistic ideas are believable, even under an Old-Earth / Old-Universe paradigm. One does not have to agree with them on the age of the universe in order to appreciate this. To cast them as being in league with the Enemy just seems rather unecessary (except in the cases of some outspoken Theistic Evolutionists who actually do seem to be siding with Darwinists when the exchanges get very polemic). Anyway, your comments make this all the more clear, coming from someone who has undoubtedly had to put up with such rhetoric.

Now, it is believed that the rings of Saturn would not last more than a couple of hundred million years without replenishment, but how, precisely, is that evidence of a young solar system? Even logarithmically, it’s still closer to OEC than YEC.

There are things going on with the rings that we still do not understand… check out this link, for instance:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522100753.htm

I take the YEC veiw because of it’s superior explanatory power. No other story of our past (that I have heard of) consistenty gives such satisfying explanations for not not just scientific facts, but also facts of history (worldwide flood myths, human civilisation suddenly appearing a few thousand years ago), and even theological facts (yes, there are such things). This is not to say that all the facts are given satisfying explanations by a YEC view (yet). I have, for example, long considered the Distant Starlight problem to be strong evidence against a YEC position. I hold to it nevertheless, because every other story of origins not only has similar problems, but more of them.