Daily weather
forecasts are not reliable, yet we rely on them because they are more right than
wrong.
The D-Day landings relied on a favorable meteorological report, but they
still had choppy seas and gloomy skies. So what, the campaign was successful.
Tests for cancer and
other human biological conditions are known to require confirming tests and are thus
only relied on as markers, but we use them anyway because they are efficient.
A substantial body of
science remains unproven or un-provable with instruments currently available to
us. Thus we can’t yet see inside an atom or hold light still for long enough to study the inner workings of such things. Instead we base our science on
effects.
God also expects us to deduce from effects
It is a
cornerstone biblical argument. In Romans 1:20 we read that the invisible things
of God are clearly seen and understood by what is made.
It means that God does
not provide definitive proof of his existence, but evidence of his being and of
his passing vests in the worlds that he made.
Job confirmed that idea
in Chapter 12:7-8, with his words, “speak to the earth and it will teach you”.
The irony of the argument
proposed is that New Earth thinkers cannot provide any proof of their position. They merely narrowly quote what the scriptures supposedly say, which is also not as
trusty as we would hope.
The Hebrew language
uses far fewer words than we use, so a word can have different meanings,
depending on context. Thus, the instrument used to assert a seven calendar day
creation week, is as “unreliable” as any other of the tests we now apply to our
physical world.
I am not saying the word
of God is shaky. Never. I stake my life on it. But, the first principle of
hermeneutics is to look at context. The context of the days of creation was a
world that determined time differently to the way we do so now.
The proof of that is
in Genesis 1. The days and nights that we use as time markers only appeared on
Day 4. I put it to you that heaven’s perspective of time is still totally
different to ours.
It works in “event horizons”, not to a timepiece. As such, God's "and the evening and morning were the nth day" has no concept of God's relative frame of reference.
As such, his day
was better described as the dawn and sunset of a season or major event. The
ancient of days is not bound to a clock, but as the lamb of God he does open the
seals of the book and initiate the seasons that we experience down here.
About radiometric dating
Carbon 14 dating has certainly always been limited. The Carbon-14
radioisotope has a 5,000 year half-life, which is hopelessly inadequate for proving
an old earth.
However, there are as
much as 40 different tests that confirm each other, like potassium 40 which
decays into argon 40 over a period of 1.248 x 109 years. That is a
far longer time frame than for Carbon-14. It is also used for gases trapped
inside molten igneous rock.
Because gases escape freely into the atmosphere, we
can know that what is trapped was trapped when the rock was formed and did not pre-date that event.
The many tests available
to science now are surely not definitively reliable. No one claims that. But they are
the best we have. Every test requires a lot of contextual adjustment resulting
in batteries of tests and the use of standard deviations to confirm a reliable
mean.
Would I have said that Everest is not tall for lack of a reliable instrument? Never. It is tall. Maybe I did not know how tall until we could measure it, but most suspected it was the tallest mountain in the world. So, since when does an unreliable instrument detract from observed evidence?
All those tests point
to an old earth of over 4 billion years
Even if none of the above science is reliable, we have cosmological instruments that can witness the birth of
distant events because of the limited velocity of light. What I mean is that it cannot travel faster than 3.00×108 m/s. As such, we are only now seeing events that
happened a long time ago.
It is not difficult to
measure how far away they are, so that then leaves us with a simple conclusion
about the age of such events. And they are all very old.
Why then would the
same creator, create his universe over billions of years and then haul out his
wand to make a more complex biosphere in seven days? And why, if he could do
that, was he so slow? Why not do it all instantly?
The arguments about
radiometric dating are rather weak. There are many contextual tests used to
validate ageing tests, such as glacial stratification, tree rings,
sedimentation and so on, including cosmological tests.
Unless they add up,
scientists reject radiometric tests and sample again. Thus, whenever a particular rock sample was found to be unreliable they searched
for new material. They are academics, subject to robust scrutiny, which
precludes wild guesses.
Conclusions
I find Dr
Mortenson’s arguments are once again hoist by their own petard. Its time for
our faith to stop playing the God of the gaps.
Christian philosophers
are holding their own in the scientific community with powerful and valid
arguments, and as such they are no longer ridiculed the way dark-age
theists once were in their foolish attempts to bend science to religious dogmas.
Now, Christians
generally hold the high ground against the buffoonery of men like Dawkins, who
is as rabidly dogmatic as dark age clerics were. And he regularly runs out of
road.
The evidence for God
is overwhelming. It is almost impossible to refute. Nuances and subtleties will
always puzzle us in the word and in scientific observation, but I see little
wisdom in defending a new earth which divides our house against an already skeptical
scientific community.
It is not essential to
anyone’s faith to defend a new-earth model. It is of far greater consequence to
simply stand together in our reasonable defense of a created world.
So I close by simply
reflecting on a the consequences for all of us of such a weak line of
reasoning. It leaves us tarred with the same old brush of irrelevance and dogmatism. That robs us of a voice and, without a shot being fired, hands our greatest
enemy a self-fulfilling victory.
(c) Peter Missing @ Bethelstone.com
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