I guess I’ll stick my nose in here since my name was invoked. Let me state outright that I have found the Bible to be infallible. It says what it say, we intrepret
What it says. The biggest problem is when were lost in translation. Check this out.
Hebrew is very fascinating. Unlike our language, the individual letters have meaning. For example with the word "cat" in English, the individual letters have no meaning, In Hebrew each letter would represent characteristics of the cat. Hebrew also has no numbers; the letters have dual meaning (both consonant and number). Further Biblical Hebrew is written right to left, back to front. As if that were not enough: there were no chapters, no verses, the vowels were left out, no punctuation, and no spacing! Just a continuous string of Hebrew consonants! Now that "cat" becomes "ct" or really "tc"! So you have to pick out the word from the string of letters and determine from context if say cat, cot, or coat was intended! One could write a whole paper on linguistics and Hebrew!
If you are really going to delve into some of the controversial issues in the Bible, you need to learn something of the original languages - or at least the history of the translation - especially if you are going to hang entire concepts on the meaning of a word or two. Some think this is rubbish... They say "God gave me the King James version - that's all I need". Well, for these people I offer the following simple examples:
A fine example is the Hebrew word "erets" translated as "earth" that appears in the King James Bible. What do you think of when you hear the word Earth? Probably the round spinning globe of a planet we call home - right? We subconsciously "add in" things like the Earth's: size, volume, shape, number and shape of continents, size and depth of oceans, height of mountains, diversity and quantity of wildlife (from the deepest parts of the oceans to the polar regions), etc. The word Earth comes with a lot of baggage today... This is a very recent definition of "Earth". In Biblical Hebrew, this word means "land". It could be an individual's land, the land of a city, as far as you could see, or possibly the extent of an empire. In short, it usually meant anything but what we attribute to it now!
Another example is the phrase in Genesis 1:28 "... Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth...". This helped lead Scofield and others into the gap theory - which postulates that in Genesis 1:1 everything is created, in Genesis 1:2 it becomes "formless and void", and Genesis 1:3 on details the "re-creation"! The Hebrew word translated as "replenish" really simply means to "fill".
My final example is the word Adam/Man. Most do not realize that the Hebrew word for "Adam" and "man" are one and the same. The translators decided where to put in "Adam". There is no special proper name for Adam!
Possibly now you can appreciate the difficulty, and understand some of the arguing that goes on as a result of taking these original Hebrew texts, translating them into "old English" (the language of King James in 1611) and applying our modern meanings to these older translated words!
I think you will find this information helpful and informative. I feel you will gain something - regardless of which "side" you fall on with regard to any one of these controversial topics.
That being said I agree with Jim Scott on this. I did not mean to imply the Bible can be interpered
Many different ways, simpley that through are own inperfections, and quest for short cuts, many people have manipulated the bible to say what they want it to. I believe that each passage of scripture states only what the arthor intended it to say. I have found no..( read zero(0) discrepancyes in scripture itself. This leads me to state with a given amount of assurance that God’s word is infaliable. The problem with interpretation comes when people do not do there home work on what there studying, or don’t bother to study at all. I find it curious that some state the don’t believe the bible when they haven’t studied it. NOT MEARLY TOOK A GLANCE AT IT BUT STUDIED IT. I doubt also that anyone here, myself included, as read every atheistic paper written, but some how believe this THEORY without question.
On to Dinosaurs!
I believe they were long gone before Adam and Eve were created.
What happened to them? Well I think its a virtual certainty that it was a meteor impact. Do you know we have recently discovered a crater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula (Chicxulub) that is 120 miles across! This calls for an asteroid at least 9 miles in diameter! In 1883 Krakatoa erupted and in the U.S. and during the next season temperatures were down an average of 7 degrees overall. That may not seem too significant to you but consider that this led to very wide spread crop failure in the U.S. and even more catastrophic failures in Europe. Now consider that Chicxulub was an explosion over 1000 times more powerful (yes 1 thousand)! This clearly would have had a devastating impact on all life on this planet. As further proof this event dates to the time of the dinosaurs extinction (approximately 65 million years ago) and at that layer there is over 300 times more iridium (element contained in asteroids) than expected. Most scientists recognize this as the "smoking gun" for what happened to the dinosaurs
Annnnnnnd the increadible shrinking sun.
Prior to our understanding of nuclear energy, the only explanation scientists could come up with for the sun's energy was gravitational contraction. If this was indeed what powered the sun, more than 100 million years ago the sun would have been larger than the earth's orbit! Further evidence came from "some" measurements that seemed to indicate a small decrease in the suns diameter.
Rebuttal: From what we now know about nuclear reactions, the temperature and pressure inside a collapsing sun would ignite nuclear fusion (nuclear energy power is therefore unavoidable). The idea of a sun decreasing in diameter has been completely disproved by the much more precise measurements of Barry LaBonte and Robert Howard. If you still have any doubts, the sun's temperature, luminosity, spectral line emissions, radius, and mass, all dictate an energy source through converting hydrogen into helium (nuclear fusion) for about 5 billion years. It further indicates that this fusion should proceed for about another 5 billion years. This is very good science firmly rooted in physics... Remember we have nuclear reactors on the Earth now!
AND CARBON DATEING.
This is probably one of the areas that get written about the most. Young earth creationists usually devote an entire chapter of their books to its alleged problems - often imaginary or greatly exaggerated. Since the dates being measured can be in the billions of years, and there is a margin of error, the dates can be off by more years than the young earth creationists believe the earth to be. This leads them to laugh at the error being stated as +/- x million years... well that's because we are dealing with billions of years of history. An analogy would be young earthers counting how many thousandths of an inch a major interstate had, while the rest of us were counting the miles!
Radiometric dating is basically measuring the amount of decay in a radioactive element. Radioactive is just that - it is actively radiating energy. When this energy is radiated away it will change into another element. This process is measured in terms of "half life" - which refers to the amount of time required for there to only be half of the original element present. After another half-life there is only half of that original half left (or 1/4) - this continues on down the line. With carbon 14 dating for example if an item was dated to 11,540 years, it would only have 1/4 of the original carbon 14 which means that it had gone through 2 half life periods (5770 + 5770 = 11,540 years). You can only go back about 10 half-lives before there is so little of the original material left - you can't measure it.
The way it works is kind of simple. Think of the analogy of a solar system, pretend at specified rate planet orbits decay to the point that they drift away - this is similar to what happens to the atoms of these radioactive elements. The orbits of the atom particles are not stable long term - they have a shelf life if you will (the half-life). Nothing on this earth is forever - it will eventually decay. If fact, we have discovered that the entire universe is literally wearing out just as depicted in the Bible (Isiah 51:56). God has created the laws of physics, wound up the universe and is letting it run down... we can even measure this wearing down... it's called entropy. Radioactive decay is proof of this wearing down. Radioactive decay too supports the Bible.
I will briefly cover 2 of the main type of radioactive dating here - there are others and they are getting more accurate all the time.
Carbon 14 dating has a half-life of 5,770 years. It decays into nitrogen 14. It is only useful for measuring the age of prior living matter. The amount of initial carbon 14 can be determined by the amount of carbon 12 still present (which does not decay within the useful range). Ages can be determined up to 50,000 years (age since man) with an approximate 15% error rate. Carbon 14 has been cross-referenced with tree rings to achieve a very high degree of accuracy for ages up to 9,000 years. Carbon 14 dating has helped prove the age of events in the Bible - it is not something to be feared.
Potassium-Argon dating measures the rate of breakdown of potassium 40. It has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. It decays into argon 40. It is useful for dating only volcanic matter form the millions to billions of years with a plus minus date of 50,000 years.
There are no very good ways to date things (radioactively) in the "in between" age of 50,000 years to a million years. They are working on it.
The notion that radioactive decay proceeded at a different rate in the past is impossible! Radioactive decay is by definition a nuclear process. Any conditions such as temperature, pressure, radiation, etc. strong enough to alter the atomic decay rate, would completely destroy whatever it is that you are trying to date (such as a fossil or its surrounding sedimentary deposits).
The only issues are the amount of original parent material, and possible contamination.
Young earth rebuttal: The evidence for radiometric dating is weak - there is little (if any) evidence for actual decay - and even if it occurred, the rate of decay could have been higher in the past (for example during the flood). A special young earth group of scientists (RATE) has been put together that openly challenges the wisdom of conventional science on radiometric dating.
Old earth reaffirmation: The RATE group has had much difficulty explaining away the problem of radiometric dating. In fact, in their most recent findings - they make some powerful admissions. They now freely admit that much radiometric decay has indeed irrefutably taken place. They further admit you can't simply appeal to the geological processes (read the flood) to solve this difficult problem.
Check out these quotes from the most recent RATE (pro YEC) paper:
"Others had tried—and for some, the search went on for a while in the early RATE days—to find the answer in geological processes. But Drs Humphreys and Baumgardner realized that there were too many independent lines of evidence (the variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium radiohalos, fission track dating and more) that indicated that huge amounts of radioactive decay had actually taken place. It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be a single, unifying answer that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves."
And what about this one this one...
"By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)"
Source:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2003/0821rate.asp
It is equally hard to envision a greatly accelerated rate of decay in the past... If the current radioactive decay rate is sufficient to sustain plate tectonics over a few billion years, one must wonder... What are the consequences of putting a few billion years of decay into the short time scales they require?
If all that decay were confined to a single year or a few days (during the creation week) you would have an unimaginable amount of energy (read heat) released. You would vaporize the oceans and melt the earth. And if all this decay actually took place -- how is it that we STILL have active uranium mines... it should have all decayed (actually went up like a nuke with that fast of a decay) long ago. Since they (YECs) believe the earth is only a few thousand years old, and they admit (now) that much decay has taken place, and moreover they trust carbon dates into biblical times (read thousands of years) but still want them to be off for even further back -- Let's not forget, they believe the entire universe is only thousands of years old -- so it puts a VERY tiny window on when these decay rates could have been functioning differently that today's measurable rates. And the further back you "trust" any radioactive dates, the more unexplainable their position becomes especially when you want the uranium derived dates to be operating differently than say carbon dates. Why is all this important? Because they completely miss the point that the earth is a very poor conductor of heat. If this much heat was released (through accelerated decay) the earth would still be VERY hot -- you cannot cool the earth in a mere few thousand years to present levels. The situation is completely hopeless.
I’ll stop here. Unless anyone has a question directly for me this will probably be my last post on this thread. I do not have a computer at home, and mostly post between breaks. I will continue to read the discussions here on my PC phone, but I can not sign in for some reason. Even if I could I would have to use a stylus on a tiny on-screen keyboard. My time will be limited in the next few weeks, and I’d like to focus on developing the relationship with those of you who have been Pming me.
To those of you I haven’t PM ed in a while, I apologize. Also, since I believe in the doctrine of the elect, and predestination. I believe God has foreordained His children (Romans 8:28-34) for His glory. I also believe that there are those who will never accept the message of the cross because God has foreordained this as well. Again I’m more than happy to address questions aimed at me here, other wise I look forward to speaking with all of you on other threads. Thanks! I’ve enjoyed it. I can explain what war is like, you can go watch “Saving private Ryan” but until you experience it first hand you wouldn’t have a clue. God is like this!
Until you experience Him first hand, and he changes You’re life in ways that would make Dr. Phil green with envy it’s a hard concept. PERSONALLY, what HE has done in my life is all the evidence I’ll ever need.
Justin Jacob Zak