Creation vs. Atheism

@nuffsed81:

"If i had the time i bet i could link all this to the quran or the torah, so why choose christianity out of the 3 abrahamic claims?"

Simple. The Quran was authored in a cave by Muhammad centuries after Jesus, and consistently claims that it was given because the Jews did not properly preserve the Old Testament given to them by God. Ergo, if the Old Testament is properly preserved, then the Quran is wrong. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the Old Testament was properly preserved, thus Islam is false.

www3.nd.edu/~reynolds/index_files/scriptural%20falsification.pdf

As for Judaism, the Torah is filled throughout with messianic prophecies foretelling exactly what the Messiah would be like. Many are recognized by Jews as being messianic prophecies. One of these, the prophecy of 70 weeks in Daniel 9:25-28, foretold that the Jewish Messiah was to arrive 69 weeks of years, or 483 years after the building of the wall in Jerusalem (445/444 B.C.) per Nehemiah 2:1. The Messiah should have arrived around 31-32 A.D. So far as I know there are no other candidates besides Jesus considered by Judaism for that time period. Thus, messianic prophecies themselves can narrow down Christianity as the correct choice.

There is historical evidence for supernatural claims. For example the Ipuwer Papyrus preserves evidence of the Biblical plagues as they were occurring. Friedrich Nietzsche's madness prophecies occurred some 50 years before World War II, as God ironically used the epitomy of atheism to prophesy a warning to the Jewish people half a century early.

biblestrength.com/Nietzsche%27s_Prophecy

More recently photographic evidence of Bibles and crosses miraculously surviving a church fire made the news:

www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/05/bibles-crosses-survive-west-virginia-church-fire/3074465002/

The trouble is that any skeptic who doesn't want to believe can simply deny any level of historical evidence. They want reproducible evidence you'd obtain from a laboratory setting. Thing is, God is not a natural process but an individual Almighty Creator who chooses when and if to do miracles, conditioned upon faith. He doesn't do parlor tricks to convince people, although in some cases He did provide physical evidence to those genuinely seeking Him, sometimes to show them what His will was (for example Thomas and the apostles and Gideon; John 20:27; Luke 24:36-49; Judges 6). Those who seek Him honestly and earnestly will find Him, but it will be of His own choosing how that happens. To a large degree Christianity is based on a personal experiential relationship with God and therefore not transmissable apart from testimony.

@Jzyehoshua Exactly, any skeptic who doesn't want to believe can and will deny any amount of historical evidence handed to them.

"Those who seek Him honestly and earnestly will find Him, but it will be of His own choosing how that happens. " Keep what he said here in mind to anyone reading this, agree 100%.

@Jzyehoshua

"1. You say that "Human population growth is currently much higher than its historical average." How do you know that? The historical data on human population growth gets very shaky before the 1800's."

As I said, we know that China's population in 2CE was of order 58 million. Their population in 1368 CE was of order 60 million. So over a period of 1300 years, China at least, had a population growth of very nearly zero. Even if those estimates are wildly wrong, it's unlikely that would have miscounted 100,000 as 58 million. Birth rates don't tell the whole story here anyway. Death rates, particularly among children, have plummeted in the last 200 years, and particularly in the last century. The countries you mention, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, and Uganda have infant mortality rates of 20-30, which are still fairly high by modern standards, but England the infant mortality rate was 135 in 1879. Based on (ironically) the Bible and the Talmud alone, we can estimate that the infant mortality rate in the Ancient times to be a shocking 300 (i.e. 30% of children died before reaching, in this case, 14). Other estimates put this value even higher. Even the most backward and war-torn countries of the modern era are still better off, in this metric, than the pre-industrial world.
faculty.biu.ac.il/~barilm/articles/to_check/infant.html
In fact, global population growth rates have only been above 1% during the 2000s. Even in the 1900s they were only 0.5%.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates

"humans still would go from 8 individuals to 7 billion in 29,426 years, still far too short for the hundreds of thousands that are claimed by Evolutionists."

The data does not support an exponential growth rate, so that's not what is being claimed. Moreover, nobody in the scientific community is claiming, AFAIK, that we were ever a population is small as 8. Even with modern technology trying to maintain a species, this is basically guaranteed extinction level.

"For an Evolutionist to argue that human population has been around millions of years they must argue that growth has been at a standstill all that time, and that human population did not begin growing substantially until the past 10,000 years."

Modern humans likely evolved sometime around 200,000 years ago, so it's not million of years, no. And yes, probably the population would have been fairly static for some time. Is that so surprising? Animal populations tend to be quite stable over long periods of time unless acted on by some external forcing (climate change, introduced species, habitat loss, overhunting, etc.). Early humans likely followed a similar trajectory.

"The reasonable answer is that those civilizations began after the Flood, which is why there is reference to a global Flood in ancient cultural legends worldwide. "

Well, except that we have archaeological evidence of these civilizations existing before the Flood in the same areas, and no evidence of a worldwide crash of any of these civilizations.

"Furthermore, you are forgetting about continental drift following the break up of Pangaea during the Flood. "

.....No, continental drift is not relevant on human timescales. The timescale of the breakup of Pangaea is tens of millions of years. The energies required to accelerate the plates to speeds where this would be possible over human timescales, then somehow stop them would be a greater cataclysm than the flood itself. Also, that would still not explain how humans and animals managed to get to China, which was part of the separate landmass Cathaysia, and not connected to Pangaea at all.

"A 2012 study published in Science determined that the saltier parts of the oceans got 4% saltier over the last 50 years. While the study attributed salinity alteration to global warming, had such a rate occurred constantly throughout history the oceans would have doubled in saltiness in less than 1300 years, and roughly 4,000 years have passed since the Flood."

This is rather outside my area of expertise, but evidence dating to just the last Ice Age puts the salinity rates somewhat higher than present, though the changes appear to be quite small as a whole. In any event, assuming modern rates are in any way representative of historic ones is very dubious--especially when we have reason to believe that the current increase in salinity is due to human intervention.

"Thus, the oceans would logically have been far less salty during the Flood, allowing vegetation to survive."

No, the vegetation would not survive. The salinity is a problem for the aquatic life fish. Being submerged in water for half a year is a problem for the plants. Like, there's a few hardy species that could conceivably survive this (though I doubt it), but typical flora are going to be completely wiped out.

"As for where the water came from and where it went, I previously addressed that earlier, but it's addressed here. Essentially the Earth has as much as five times as much water within the Earth's core as outside it. "

That's only a very small part of the problem with the thermodynamics of this system. I don't have the time to go into the details. I'll see if I can find a link to someone who has done this before, I'm sure I've seen it.

"First of all, the consistent finding that microevolution occurs far more rapidly than has been assumed implies a much younger Earth"

No, it just implies that evolution is more rapid than earlier estimates.

"Furthermore, since life is evolving so rapidly, we should be able to see evolution into entirely different types of life-macroevolution-if the theory of evolution is true"

We have observed numerous instances of new species emerging. I'm not sure if any of these species have been formally classified into a new genus, but there are a few cases that probably could be. The timescale may still be too large in practical terms--e.g. the LTEE experiment generated a new, very distinctive species of bacterium, but that required 20000-30000 generations.

"Biblically the Flood would have happened in 2547 B.C."

I was using 2348 BCE, which seems to be the generally accepted year based on Biblical chronology. If you used a different number you would of course get a different answer.

@LaserGuy

You are picking a time period that shows little growth; in large part because the 2 A.D. census by the Han Dynasty of 59.6 million people was followed by constant non-stop war (see e.g. the era of the Three Kingdoms). However, the earlier Zhou dynasty census in 680 B.C. showed a population of 11.84 million people, so over the 682-year period leading up to the Han, there was population growth of 0.24% if you are assuming Chinese census records were accurate.

At a 0.24% population growth rate, one would go from 8 people to 6 billion in less than 8,600 years. Obviously it's still a bit low for creationism, but it's a whole lot closer than evolution's millions of years.

I would agree that infant mortality was high in ancient times. However, birth rates were higher as well. The U.S. birth rate has declined substantially. It was not uncommon in America's frontier period in the 1700s and 1800s for families to have ten or more children. Thomas Jefferson's mother for example had a dozen children. George Washington's sister had 11 children in addition to the three her husband had from a previous wife.

books.google.com/books?id=0c-adTP64AsC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13

When there is room to expand and grow (as during America's westward expansion), population growth seems to increase; whereas in crowded urban conditions it seems to contract. This was the case in ancient Israel as well. Israel's twelve tribes come from Jacob, who had four wives with at least thirteen children. King David had 7 brothers and two sisters.

"Well, except that we have archaeological evidence of these civilizations existing before the Flood in the same areas, and no evidence of a worldwide crash of any of these civilizations."

What archaeological evidence would you point to? The span of recorded history is only around 5,000 years which roughly corresponds to Biblical chronologies. Assuming a Flood in 2547 B.C. then there would be 4,564 years of recorded history.

Furthermore, how old are the oldest manuscripts preserving that history? The Dead Sea Scrolls are a rare historical anomaly in preserving so much ancient detail. Some ancient documents (e.g. Hindu) are claimed to have been preserved through oral tradition for thousands of years, and there are no extant manuscripts more recent than the middle ages. Many of the oldest surviving Greek and Roman manuscripts date no older than the middle ages as well, and while they are claimed to date into the B.C. era, there are no manuscripts bridging thousand-year gaps, as pointed out by Josh McDowell.

www.josh.org/wp-content/uploads/Bibliographical-Test-Update-08.13.14.pdf

Atheists regularly question how well preserved the Bible is, even though there are Old Testament manuscripts dating as far back as 1,000 B.C. (Khirbet Qeiyafa pottery sherd) and the Bible's eye for an eye precept is preserved back before 1,700 B.C. per the Code of Hammurabi. Then of course the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the majority of the Old Testament before the time of Christ. The New Testament has multiple manuscripts dating to the 2nd century A.D., roughly only a century or even less after the originals per the John Rylands papyrus (p52), p104, p90, etc.

biblestrength.com/Manuscript_Evidence_for_the_Bible

By holding the documents of ancient antiquity to the exacting standard regularly set for the Bible, much of our records of ancient antiquity should be considered suspect; as they are far worse preserved than the Biblical accounts. There are far fewer manuscripts, and there is a much larger gap between the time period they describe and the actual manuscript date (again, regularly 1,000 years or more).

".....No, continental drift is not relevant on human timescales. The timescale of the breakup of Pangaea is tens of millions of years. The energies required to accelerate the plates to speeds where this would be possible over human timescales, then somehow stop them would be a greater cataclysm than the flood itself. Also, that would still not explain how humans and animals managed to get to China, which was part of the separate landmass Cathaysia, and not connected to Pangaea at all."

Trouble is, the actual observed speed of plate tectonics, as with microevolution, is not consistent with the vast time scales constantly referenced; which is why it's constantly reported that the processes are "accelerating" or "speeding up." The process of plate tectonics itself remains poorly understood, and in places like Hawaii and Timor plate tectonics is much too rapid for conventional models.

www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329843-000-earths-tectonic-plates-have-doubled-their-speed/

www.iflscience.com/physics/rapid-tectonic-shifts-explained/

Geologic processes can occur more rapidly than academia has previously acknowledged. For example a brand new island formed within a few months back in 2014-15.

www.foxnews.com/science/mysterious-island-that-formed-in-the-pacific-ocean-is-here-to-stay

"This is rather outside my area of expertise, but evidence dating to just the last Ice Age puts the salinity rates somewhat higher than present, though the changes appear to be quite small as a whole. In any event, assuming modern rates are in any way representative of historic ones is very dubious--especially when we have reason to believe that the current increase in salinity is due to human intervention."

Wasn't the whole basis for evolutionary theory's long timespans originally the uniformitarian principle that "the present is the key to the past"? Originally the idea was to extrapolate backwards based on observed data to conclude what happened in Earth's past. But now that observational data increasingly contradicts the theory of evolution's long time spans, now we need to assume observational data is a recent anomaly that is too fast to reflect how things were in the past, and has just accelerated due to climate change?

"No, the vegetation would not survive. The salinity is a problem for the aquatic life fish. Being submerged in water for half a year is a problem for the plants. Like, there's a few hardy species that could conceivably survive this (though I doubt it), but typical flora are going to be completely wiped out."

Well, there are plants that survive in salt water. For example phytoplankton and kelp produce most of the Earth's oxygen; although I suppose that's not what you're referring to by 'typical flora.' But again ocean salinity levels have increased over time.

"We have observed numerous instances of new species emerging. I'm not sure if any of these species have been formally classified into a new genus, but there are a few cases that probably could be. The timescale may still be too large in practical terms--e.g. the LTEE experiment generated a new, very distinctive species of bacterium, but that required 20000-30000 generations."

Thing is, we define what a species is (often as the result of fierce disagreement among academics as to what criteria should be considered). If you look at ancient life, it was much the same as today's. Many "transitional forms" referred to are similar to their modern-day counterparts and would fall within the created kinds of Genesis; e.g. ancient nautiloids, octopuses, cockroaches, bees, ants, leaf insects, spiders, sharks, stingrays, etc.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

I am a creationist, and I believe that our universe was created by God around 6,000 years ago....

I stopped there. 6,000 years? Maybe, sure. I would guess billions, but I can't be sure. Dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago, but i'm believing what I read. I might be wrong. Is there a God? Sure, possibly, of some sort. I'm more interested if there is anything after death.

I guess I believe after awhile some atoms bumped into other atoms and some chemistry and biology happened and then eventually a cell formed....and evolution and other cells formed under different circumstances.....just go into the jungle and it's crazy how things grow from out of "nowhere."

@BisoMiso

I should point out that BlackBishop's position on the age of the universe is a bit different from my own. Per Genesis 1, even before the week of creation, Earth existed and had standing water on it; thus raising the possibility that other planetary bodies likewise existed throughout the universe as well, although their light had seemingly not yet been created. The acknowledgement that Earth's geology and planetary bodies already existed is what's called Gap Theory.

While Genesis 1 through 2 covers a lot, it is not fully comprehensive. Clearly it's not telling us about the creation of Earth itself or the water on Earth, or the creation of the angels (including the original creation of God who then made everyone and everything else; Jesus). So Gap Theory allows for an older date to certain geologic layers as well as celestial bodies, just not to life itself. Furthermore, since the sun would not be created until the 4th day (Genesis 1:14-19) the possibility exists that days were measured in longer periods than 24 hours until this point.

Attempts to find a cyclical model for the universe which avoid a beginning (e.g. Steady State, Oscillating Universe, Cosmic Hesitation) have failed again and again; as pointed out by Hugh Ross in "The Fingerprint of God."

alta3b.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/fingerprint-of-god.pdf

Thing is, the Big Bang theory with its purely naturalistic explanation for our origins also has its issues; not least of which is where the molecules for such an explosion originally came from. With a naturalistic explanation, one is left to essentially keep asking "where did that come from?"

At a more specific level, there are serious observational issues with the Big Bang, including:

NO ANTIMATTER

The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The problem is, virtually all of the antimatter is missing.

home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem

ACCELERATING EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE

In 1998, the Hubble Telescope made the startling discovery that the universe's expansion rate is not consistent with an old universe, resulting in the conclusion that it has somehow accelerated. To explain this, the concepts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy were invented to explain why over 90% of the universe's "stuff" if you will is missing; in order to fit the Big Bang model. Trouble is, no direct evidence for Dark Energy or Dark Matter has actually been found.

science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

From a Creationist perspective, this is of course not a problem at all but expected, since the Bible repeatedly says God spreads out the Heavens. (Job 9:8; Psalms 104:2; Isaiah 40:22; etc.)

As noted by Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, and Riess, an STScI cosmologist, in National Geographic:

"'We have two known, totally unsatisfactory explanations,' said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. One possibility is there is no dark energy, and gravity works differently than scientists think. But 'physicists are conservative. We don't want to throw away our theory of gravity when we might be able to patch it up,' Nobel co-winner Riess, an STScI cosmologist, told National Geographic News. 'Basically it all comes down to the fact that there's one relatively simple equation we work with to describe the universe,' Riess said.' Because we see this extra effect, we can either blame it on the left-hand side of the equation and say we don't understand gravity, or we can blame it on the right-hand side and say there's this extra stuff.'"

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/111004-nobel-prize-physics-universe-expansion-what-is-dark-energy-science/

PLANET FORMATION

A massive planet, too large to fit conventional Big Bang theory, was discovered; Kepler-10c.

www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-171

SPIRAL GALAXIES

Creationist Russ Humphreys has been pointing, for a while, to the issues caused by spiral galaxies for the Big Bang model. These issues are readily apparent, and are another reason why Dark Matter gets brought up.

http://apps.usd.edu/esci/creation/age/content/creationist_clocks/spiral_galaxies.html

New discoveries show that spiral galaxy observations do not fit conventional Big Bang models.

phys.org/news/2016-09-spiral-irregular-galaxies-current-dark.html

FAINT YOUNG SUN PARADOX

If the Earth specifically is billions of years old, then the sun would have been 30% dimmer than it is today during life's beginnings. However, the geologic record consistently shows there was liquid water on Earth from the beginning. There remains no explanation for how life could have started on what should have basically been a giant ball of frozen ice. Attempts to explain away the paradox with more greenhouse gases have still failed to achieve a working model.

www.technologyreview.com/s/424154/faint-young-sun-paradox-not-solved-says-nasa/

SINGULARITIES

Under the Big Bang model, all the laws of physics would have broken down. Essentially we can't explain how the universe came to exist via purely naturalistic processes without discarding all the laws of physics as we know them. Stephen Hawking explained this as follows:

"At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

So in conclusion, yes, even using Genesis it's reasonable to reach an older date for parts of the universe itself. However, naturalistic Big Bang models contain serious problems right now and do not match scientific evidence either. The expansion rate of the universe and structure of spiral galaxies, in and of themselves, suggest a younger creation of the universe; as does the Faint Young Sun Paradox.

Exodus 20:11

' For in six days God made heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in them and rested on the seventh day : therefore God blessed the sabbath day and sanctified it.'

@phlegm

True. But the question is in the definition of the word "day." As used in Genesis 1, it was a single light/dark cycle.

Genesis 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Since the sun, moon, and stars were not designed to give light until the 4th day, the question is whether those first four days were 24-hour cycles.

Genesis 1:14 ¶ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

So what would have been the original source of light then? Jesus, the firstborn of Creation by whom all else was created, the Light of the World, was likely the original source of light, just as He will be the last. (John 8:12; Colossians 1:15-20)

Revelation 21:23 And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
24 And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.
25 And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.

@ jzyehoshua

Gen 1:14 I read somewhere that in the original text it says "light bearers" , speaking of the sun, moon and stars.

I believe that that the light god created was electro magnetic radiation which was then allocated to the light bearers as we see it today. I believe that the night and day cycle didn't change. God makes no mention of a sudden change in the duration of night and day and in exodus 20;11 this 24 hour day is confirmed.

When studying scripture it is always wise to interpret that which seems vague in the light of that which is clear. I believe that God is well capable of creating the universe in six 24 hour days.

@phlegm

A translation of "light bearers" is used in the Amplified Bible, so I'm guessing that's what you're referring to. The original Hebrew text overlapping with the KJV (interlinear) is as follows:

Genesis 1:14 ¶ And God <'elohiym> said, <'amar> Let there be lights <ma'owr> in the firmament <raqiya`> of the heaven <shamayim> to divide <badal> the day <yowm> from the night; <layil> and let them be for signs, <'owth> and for seasons, <mow`ed> and for days, <yowm> and years: <shaneh>

www.biblestudytools.com/interlinear-bible/passage/?q=genesis+1:5&t=kjv

The original Hebrew word translated as "lights" or "light bearers" is ma'owr, and it is used 19 times in the Old Testament. 18 times it is translated by the KJV as "lights" and once as "bright."

www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/kjv/maowr.html

"When studying scripture it is always wise to interpret that which seems vague in the light of that which is clear. I believe that God is well capable of creating the universe in six 24 hour days."

God is capable of creating the entire universe in six 24 hour days. But that's not what the Bible says happened. Genesis 1:1 shows that Earth already existed and had standing water on it before the creation week, so clearly Earth itself and water on it had already been created.

I am aware that attempts to define day as a strictly 24-hour period have been made based on the usage of the Hebrew word, yowm, in the Old Testament. However, in Genesis 1:5 it clearly says what the definition of day is; light, just as the definition of night (Heb. layil) is darkness (Heb. choshek).

www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/kjv/yowm.html

And again, since the sun did not exist until the 4th day, it raises the question of whether 24-hour days were involved until that point.