Young Earth Looks Old

[txpaleo]

Do you remember when you where a kid and your folks used to say, don't believe everything you see? That saying should still hold true. Just becuase something looks old doesn't necassarily mean it is. For instance, When you picuture Adam on the 6th day of creation, how old do you picture him? ............Times up.......Most people say he was around 25-30 years of age. But wait, he was just created 1 hour ago. How about that Giant 200 year oak tree that he is sleeping under. The tree rings and Dendrochronolgy would tell us that the tree was 200 hundred years old even though God mad the tree on day 3 of Creation.

So do you see my point..even though science or even what we see with our own eyes, doesn't mean that its true. Do you think the Garden of Eden was just a bunch of seeds and Adam had to wait for things to grow. Of course not, Adam and Eve where both told after they were created that they could eat any fruit they wanted except from the tree in the center of the Garden. That means 3 days after being created the trees already had fruit that was ripe to eat. This shows that God can make things with the appearance of age.

God Bless

Steve Baird

www.bairdclan.com

[nebula]

Gen. 2:8 - "The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. "

Looks like the Lord took some time to put this Garden together to me.

[Guest shiloh357]

That means 3 days after being created the trees already had fruit that was ripe to eat. This shows that God can make things with the appearance of age.

But you are working from the assumption that the days were three 24 hr time periods, right?

There is no reason to believe that we are talking about literal twenty-four days.

[Khristeeanos]

They can't be long periods of time because you would have plants around for a long time before there was a sun and then they would have to wait around for another long period of time before the insects could polinate them.

Jesus healed a man born completely unable to walk and the muscles and ballance was there, giving it an appearent, but non-existant age.

Why not just read the Bible like it was supposed to be? It is so simple.

[txpaleo]

Okay I'll address teh 24 hour literal period. The Hebrew word used in the OT is "yom"..which according to a concordance can mean day, age, epoch ect, except and according to Hebrew rules unless the word "yom" is followed or proceeded by a number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5,, 6 ect) or a ending/beginning word. Such as morning, evening, beginning or ending for example. So according to the rules for Hebrew translation the word "yom" is talking about a literal 24 hours.

Also...Outside of Genesis 1, the word "yom" is used just over 410 times and and each case it refers to a 24 hour period, so why would the word mean anything different in Genesis 1?

Steve Baird

www.bairdclan.com

[Ovedya]

In God's creation all of the plants came forth from the earth, bearing seeds and fruits according to its own kind. This happened within the same day they were created:

"And God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good." (Gen 1:11-12)

However (And here's the monkey wrench thrown into the cog of the whole thing), please notice one interesting thing here: There is no indication that God created the seeds to begin with. The seeds were already within the earth, for God said, "Let the earth bring forth..." According to the footnotes in Scofield, this could be a strong indication of a pre-creative judgment of the earth (ie. a void earth with waters. Water indicates judgment). Spin that one around for a while. :oww:

[Bread_of_Life]

I wasn't born yesterday!!

At age 11 I was innoculated against Tuberculosis. It was a fairly frightening experience, because I had been told by the people in the year above me at school that it was really painful. As it turned out, the injection itself wasn't that painful, although it did last a while. For an hour afterwards my arm hurt quite badly, as if it'd been stretched from the inside, but it wasn't as bad as I'd been told it would be - and lets be fair, I havn't gotten TB.

However, the injection left me with an unmistakable scar on my left arm. The injection was called a "BCG", and the scar is called a "BCG scar". It's a permanent scar, it'll always be there until the day I die. My BCG scar is one of many little evidences and clues that shows that I was not created old, that I actually went through a childhood period.

The present gives clues to the past

My little toes are another evidence. They're crooked. Most people's little toes are crooked. That's because they've been broken many times, and had to heal. I've banged my toes a lot, especially when I was young and clumsier - most people do - and the bones in them are so small that they break easily - and because they're so small, we don't need to go to hospital to fix them - they just hurt for a while and heal themselves. However, enough breaks and they don't look straight any more, they look crooked.

There are other reasons I don't think I was created as an adult yesterday. The scar on my left arm from when I put my hand through a window for example. The rough skin on the soles of my feet, hardened from years of wear and tear. My hernia scars. Erosion and chips in my teeth. Those are just the evidences I can see on the outside. If I looked inside me, I could see many more evidences of years of wear and tear that would show that I wasn't created an adult yesterday, but have lived through a childhood and adolescence, like every other human being. But I don't have a scalpel, and even if I did, I wouldn't cut myself open to check.

The same is true of the earth

I'm not sure if you're yet aware of the point I'm getting at here, so let me spell it out. I don't just look like I'm 23 - I look like I've actually been around, living, breathing, falling, being innoculated, and putting my hands through windows for 23 years. And lets complete the analogy. The earth doesn't just look 5 billion years old - it doesn't just look mature - it bears all the scars, the strains, and the hallmarks of having actually lived and breathed for the last 5 billion years.

Different Rock Ages

Firstly, the rocks we find arn't all the same age. The oldest rock we've found is 4.2 billion years old. The youngest is brand new. We've found rocks from pretty much every time period in between those two dates, often in order from the top to the bottom of rock strata. The earth doesn't look as if every part of it is 4.2 billion years old - it looks as if it's been constantly eroded and added to, had rocks created and destroyed by heat for 4.2 billion years.

The Fossil Record

Secondly, we don't just find rock inside rocks. We find a whole myriad of things. Most obviously interesting are signs of life - fossils - shapes and bones preserved and mineralised of creatures long dead. And the older the rock, the less recognisable the lifeform. In fact, we find different lifeforms in different ages of rock. The oldest fossil we've ever found is 3.7 billion years old - it's just remants of tiny single celled bacteria, having left their imprints on the rocks they lived and died on.

For about 2 billion years, all we find are traces of tiny organisms - for all the rocks we've found over 1 billion years old, we've never found a human, a leech, a trilobyte, a dinosaur. It's almost as if the rocks really were around back then, just we wern't. Then multicellular lifeforms start appearing in the fossil record, but none with hard parts until the Cambrian explosion about 500 million years ago. After the Cambrian explosion, we find many more fossils, because hard parts are more easily fossilised. But we still find the fossils in order. We've never found a trilobyte in the triassic, we've never found a human in the Cambrian, we've never found a dinosaur in the Carboniferous, and we've never found a bird before the Jurassic. That's because the rocks don't just look old - they are old, and they record the creatures that were around at the time, and not any others.

Mass extinctions, meteors etc

Talking of fossils, we also find 4 mass extinctions in the fossil record. Between 380 and 364 million years ago, the Frasnian Fammenian extinction wiped out 60% of marine life. That was followed by the biggest extinction of all, when 96% of the world's species disappear at the end of the Permian, 251 million years ago. There was another huge die-off at the end of the Triassic 201 million years ago. And finally, the most famous extinction of all, 66 million years ago the dinosaurs and numerous other groups met their end at the cretaceous-tertiary boundary - known as the "K-T" boundary. We also have a good idea what caused these extinctions - because the causes leave signs behind. For example, meteor impacts leave behind shocked quartz and microspherules, excess Iridium, a crater and an abundence of molecules called fullerines. Some or all of these are present in the rock strata at the time of each of the above fossil extinctions. At the K-T boundary, all of these appear. We also find evidence of "flood-basalts" at each extinction - a phenomenon of extreme and prolonged volcanic activity. I say again, the earth doesn't look mature, it looks as if it's really been around for 4.2 billion years - it bears all the scars.

If you're really interested, why not look at this webpage - it shows the order of the rock strata and fossils within those rocks: http://www.fossilmall.com/Science/Paleonto...ogical_Time.htm

Surface Features

I mentioned earlier that we found lots of things in rocks, as well as fossils. One of the things we find are surface features, such as raindrops, leaf imprints, pollen and footprints.

These suggest that each layer has been at the surface at one point. That means that each layer really has been built up over a period of geological time, not created by some sort of inundation.

Geology also shows climatic changes

As we dig down, not only in rocks but in Ice Cores, we can also find different abundances of elements, suggesting changes in climate. Ice cores are particularly effective at this, but can only really tell us about the last 150,000 years or so. However, even that disproves the YEC age of 6,000 years.

Conclusion

It's one thing creating Adam old, it's another creating him with a BCG scar, crooked toes and worn teeth. If you create Adam old, then you're conning noone - any reasonably intelligent person could tell that he had no wear and tear on him, no signs of having lived through a childhood. However, if God created him with a BCG scar, then it starts to look like deliberate deception. You're not just creating Adam mature, you're creating him such that he looks as if he's actually been living through babyhood to adulthood.

It's one thing creating the earth mature. It's another creating it with all the scars, the craters, the ordered fossils, the extinctions, the climatic changes, the flood basalts etc etc that it'd take to fool any right minded person into thinking it actually was old. And that's only a fraction of the evidence that the earth really is old, and not just appearing old.

Sure, we could be the victim of a huge cosmic joke, perpetrated by God. Yes, he could be deliberately making the earth to fool us into thinking that it's old, when it's really not. Yes, he could have created me yesterday, with my memories intact, crooked toes, a BCG scar and all. And yes, we would be none the wiser, because if you're a powerful and clever enough prankster, you can create a clever enough deception to fool everyone. But there is no evidence that this really is the case, and it's far simpler to believe that the earth really is old. And moreover, theologically speaking, who wants to worship a God that lies?

[Guest shiloh357]

Okay I'll address teh 24 hour literal period. The Hebrew word used in the OT is "yom"..which according to a concordance can mean day, age, epoch ect, except and according to Hebrew rules unless the word "yom" is followed or proceeded by a number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5,, 6 ect) or a ending/beginning word. Such as morning, evening, beginning or ending for example. So according to the rules for Hebrew translation the word "yom" is talking about a literal 24 hours.

Also...Outside of Genesis 1, the word "yom" is used just over 410 times and and each case it refers to a 24 hour period, so why would the word mean anything different in Genesis 1?

Actually, the word yom is used in reference to biblical prophecy. Such terms as "in that day," and such are not references to twenty-four hours periods. So to say that in the 410 times it used outside of Gen. 1, it is always a reference to literal days is incorrect.

Nothing you have posted demonstrates a knowledge of Hebrew. There is nothing in context of Gen. 1 that demands a literal twenty-four hour reference to how yom is used.

What doctrine of Scripture would be threatened if the days were not twenty-four hour time periods? Why is the idea of the days being epochs a threat?

[Guest Scientific Christian]

Okay I'll address teh 24 hour literal period. The Hebrew word used in the OT is "yom"..which according to a concordance can mean day, age, epoch ect, except and according to Hebrew rules unless the word "yom" is followed or proceeded by a number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5,, 6 ect) or a ending/beginning word. Such as morning, evening, beginning or ending for example. So according to the rules for Hebrew translation the word "yom" is talking about a literal 24 hours.

Also...Outside of Genesis 1, the word "yom" is used just over 410 times and and each case it refers to a 24 hour period, so why would the word mean anything different in Genesis 1?

Actually, the word yom is used in reference to biblical prophecy. Such terms as "in that day," and such are not references to twenty-four hours periods. So to say that in the 410 times it used outside of Gen. 1, it is always a reference to literal days is incorrect.

Nothing you have posted demonstrates a knowledge of Hebrew. There is nothing in context of Gen. 1 that demands a literal twenty-four hour reference to how yom is used.

What doctrine of Scripture would be threatened if the days were not twenty-four hour time periods? Why is the idea of the days being epochs a threat?

Well said.

Here's another clear example of where 'yom' does not mean a literal 24-hour period.

"but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Gen 2:17)

Edited May 11, 2004 by Scientific Christian

[txpaleo]

Okay two answers here. The first will deal why it is so important that we translate this as 6 literal days...The second will be a study of the word yom from a linguist view point..

First answer:

If people use Scripture to try to justify that the days of creation are long periods of time, they usually quote passages such as 2 Peter 3:8, '... one day is with the Lord as a thousand years . . .'. Because of this, they think the days could be a thousand years, or perhaps even millions of years. However, if you look at the rest of the verse, it says, '. . . and a thousand years as one day'. This cancels out their argument! The context of this passage concerns the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. This particular verse is telling people that with God, waiting a day is like waiting a thousand years, and waiting a thousand years is like waiting a day because God is outside of time