As I am not teaching this week, I do not really have a lesson summary to present, but I want to make sure I post every week to get in to the habit of keeping this site updated. So instead of posting the week’s lesson as a summary, I thought I would post a lesson explaining a key principle in life that has been lost from modern day public education. It has to do with understanding the reasoning behind viewpoints instead of just attacking the conclusions reached or the person making the argument.
For example if I were to tell you that I am a Young Earth Biblical Creationist, many would immediately discount anything I say about science as rubbish. On the other hand if I said I was an Old Earth Neo-Darwinian Evolutionist, many would discount anything I said about Christianity to be rubbish. The simple fact that my “About This Site” page claims I can speak from both camps is considered impossible.
The problem comes from the false perception that Old Earth Neo-Darwinian Evolutionists start with facts and build hypothesis’s and theories, while Young Earth Biblical Creationist start with faith and try to twist facts to fit. In reality that is not at all what is going on, indeed neither side is based on facts.
Let me start by breaking down the Young Earth crowd. In order to be in this camp, you have made certain assumptions, either consciously or unconsciously. The first is that God exists, and matters. The second is that the Christian Bible contains what God said, and is wholly reliable and accurate. These two assumptions are the framework through which you interpret everything. These assumptions are entirely unprovable, at least by any direct means. There is a way to test them indirectly which will talk about later.
The Evolutionist crowd has its own assumptions and in order to be in this camp, you have made certain assumptions, either consciously or unconsciously. The first is that the natural world is all that there is, and if there is a God, he does not matter. This assumption means they can never accept any “supernatural” explanation to any problem, that option is eliminated by this assumption. A second assumption that is meaningful to this discussion is the concept of uniformitarianism. That means, in simple terms, that every process we observe today has always behaved that way, and always will be. Since you can not put the past in a test tube and re-run the experiment over and over there is no way to prove this assumption. So again, just like the Young Earth position, there is no way to directly test these assumptions.
Both camps actually have more assumptions then just those, but for the sake of brevity I am only citing the easiest ones to see. So how does this play out in the real world? Well let’s take an easy example. We have the fact that there are millions of dead things laid down in rock layers all over the earth. This is a simple fact; it neither proves nor disproves an old or young earth. Facts by themselves are neutral.
If we take the Evolutionary Framework of assumptions and run that fact through it, it is obvious that it proves an old earth. Various life forms arose in the past; they had babies which passed on their genes, complete with mutations and other changes, which in turn had babies. The fittest of these babies survived to reproduce, and the least fit died off. This gives you a big pile of dead things in the fossil record. So the fossil record proves the world was old, which of course was our assumption to start with.
If we take the Biblical Framework and run that same fact through, then we clearly see it proves the earth is young. The Bible records all the events that would be needed to create the fossil record. In the book of Genesis; we have the account of a planet that was first populated by lots of animals and people. The earth was then covered in a world wide flood that caused the death of almost every living thing on the surface of the planet. The flood would have buried those bodies in layers of mud that would turn to rock quickly after settling. So the fossil record actually supports and proves the Bible is true, which of course was our assumption to start with.
Do you see the problem yet? Real science and real facts are behind both. For example, if you were to build a model in a computer to simulate a world wide flood and its result, you would see it lines up well with reality. Evolutions are constantly doing the same with their models and theories.
I hope you can see at this point that the real issue in the on going debate of “old earth” versus “young earth” has nothing to do with good or bad science, or who has the best collection of facts. Both sides use the SAME FACTS and the SAME SCIENCE to make their arguments. The only real difference is the framework which they use to interpret the results.
This is why I rarely get involved in the massive threads around the internet with Young Earthers bashing Old Earthers, or what ever title you want to use. Those debates always go the same way, each side Googles up the best links to support their claims, never reaching any kind of agreement and then invariably it degrades in to personal attacks and falls completely apart. Typically neither side ever addresses the real difference in their positions, which is in the framework they are using, not in the facts or the science.
As I mentioned earlier there is an indirect way to test both set of assumptions. See the Evolutionary framework says reality sprang forth from nothing, starting with chaos and improves over time through death and destruction. The Bibilical frame work says reality was created by a perfect God, and man introduced sin, which caused death and destruction. To over simplify, the Biblical Framework says reality started good and is slowly getting worse, and the Evolutionary Framework says reality started bad and is getting better. Which do you think better fits reality as you know it? Do things tend to progress from order to chaos, or chaos to order?
When faced with this very same problem, I realized that reality as we know it is winding down, progressing towards chaos, not towards order. That told me the Biblical Framework is more in tune with reality then the Evolutionary one, which started me on the road to become a Christian.
What about you?
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