Artful Clocks: Dendrochronology’s Limitations
by William Abbott, April 13, 2016: A 2015 Yale University press release announced that Thomas Crowther, a research scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, had completed a landmark study where he estimated the global number of trees to be three trillion. Tree count studies have been done before and generally the number was thought to be about 400 billion. Crowther’s study bumped the number up more than sevenfold.
Counting trees is fundamental metrics in the science of forestry. The tremendous discrepancy between the old count of 400 billion and the new number, three trillion, begs for an explanation. How could we be so wrong about something so doable as a census, an estimation, of the living trees on earth? Atmospheric carbon dioxide has been news lately as causing Anthropogenic Global Warming. How could we hope to make sensible estimates about the carbon cycle using such a dramatic undercount of trees?
It is not hard to count trees. We have lots of practice. You just have to be careful and methodical. You have to do field checking to verify your estimates from satellite imagery. If you don’t verify, you are just guessing. You have to be rigorous in correlating the images to appropriate field inventories. But counting trees is an old trick. Inventorying forests is what foresters do. It is elemental to the science of forestry. Scientifically, they have been doing it for over one-hundred years.
For those of us who want numbers we can trust, studies like Thomas Crowther’s are unnerving. If the simplest numbers, concerning the simplest knowables, are proven to be not even close, the totals become a huge caveat about the scientific method itself.
Reproduced below are two excerpts from the 3 September 2015 Yale press release announcing the completion of Crowther’s research: …But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46% since the start of human civilization, the study estimates. …The new study used a combination of approaches to reveal that there are 3.04 trillion trees — roughly 422 trees per person.
46% is a guess, not an estimate. Why is it expressed as 46%? The study has just demonstrated how unreliable scientific tree counts can be. Now they ask us to believe you can estimate deforestation since the start of Civilization to an accuracy of approximately one percent? Should we just be thankful they didn’t reduce the the rough estimate of 422 trees per person to the decimal?
Dr. John (Jack) Hoehn’s recently published commentary in Adventist Today, titled “Natural Clocks,” starts off with tree-ring dating: dendrochronology. Dendrochronology is the art of measuring time backwards counting tree rings. Dr. Hoehn leaves us with the impression that there is nothing very challenging about dendrochronology. That dendrochronology is simple science. Count the rings, identify the years by shape and size of the growth rings, find similar growth rings in similar wood, even fossilized wood, and a way-back you go. It works like a clock, a natural machine measuring prehistoric time. Dendrochronologists make the machine work. But the machine isn’t as easy to operate as Dr. Hoehn lets on.
Intra-annual rings form when trees produce two rings in one year. Missing rings occur when autumnal moisture is lacking and the tree produces no late wood to complete the ring. Compress one thousand one hundred rings into five inches of wood, as in the Bristle-cone pine, and it becomes challenging, to say the least. Yet Dr. Hoehn confidently gives us YBP (years before present) numbers of 4845 and 5066 for famous Bristle-cone pine trees without ever mentioning that in the 1950s, in the earlier days of dendrochronology, one thousand plus-year adjustments were not unheard of in Bristle-cone pine tree dating.
Creationists routinely point to the approximate age of bristle-cone pines coinciding with an approximate biblical chronology for the flood. Dr. Hoehn thinks the bristle-cones are capable of exactly refuting an exact date of 4,000 years (YBP) for the flood. His is a peculiar, even singular, straw-man argument. There isn’t anything very threatening in dendrochronology to a young earth theory. I’m certain James Ussher himself might warn Dr. Hoehn there are problems when you try to date things too precisely using the Bible.
When cross-dating is done right you still have to contend with up to 5% of the rings not matching. Cross-dating fossilized wood is problematic, to say the least. Cross-dating is the vital part of dendrochronology, but it is fraught with errors and guessing. You can make your research worse than useless if you mess up the cross-dating, and it is so easy to do.
None of this is to say dendrochronology is not science. It is excellent science. As proxies go, tree rings are something of a gold standard when it comes to way-back machines. Dendrochronology works…sort of. But the further back you try to measure, the more problematical your measurements become, the more prone to error. Confidence about what we “know” grows less and less robust. When it comes to metrics, assumptions rule the past. And when you are assuming, you are not knowing. Assumptions make dendrochronology as much an art as it is a science.
Scientists observe exponentially more in wood than they observe in ice cores. The verifiable correlations to climate and pollen at the top of an ice sheet are speculative assumptions deeper down. Too many unknown variables make the deep ice a mystery, not a clock.
Assumptions control the glaciologists’ metrics, and those assumptions consistently impose evolutionary time on their observations. They see what they expect to see: evolutionary time. Glaciologists cross-dating ice cores is much like astronomers mapping Mars’ canals. For decades observatories passed back and forth canal maps of the planet Mars. Everyone saw them; everyone mapped them; no one disputed the existence of the observed canals. Then spacecraft observations proved the canals didn’t exist. I ask the reader to “imagine” what we don’t know about ice cores.
When we assume something is true we behave as if we know something is true. There is nothing wrong with that. Human beings probably can’t live otherwise. But humility about how much is being assumed is key to ever truly knowing anything. Dr. Hoehn’s natural clocks are really imaginary clocks—artful constructs drawn out of man’s imagination. Confirmation bias is most likely interpreting our observations. Too often when we know a thing to be true, we always see evidence of that truth no matter where we look. Dr. Hoehn knows people who look at evidence and see confirmation of their Bible-based belief in a young earth are biased by their belief. Does he know his ‘imaginary’ clocks are also vehicles for confirmation bias for those who “know” the earth is old?
Bill Abbott serves as a local elder in Columbus, Nebraska and works in the forest products industry.
Bro. Abbott,
Thank you for an insightful and informative piece.
I think the heart of the matter was in your last paragraph when you touched on behaving as if something is true. Let’s reverse it and ask: How we should behave when questions are raised about the verity of what we believe is true, if significant evidence calls what we believe is true into serious question, or if the evidence overwhelmingly shows that what we believe is incorrect?
The problem with debates about things like old/young earth creation is that it cannot be settled with the evidence available to us, so we must rely on a degree of faith. Belief in man-caused global warming requires far more faith than believing in God because there is such a volume of evidence to dispute it and a continual stream of revelations about the lies contrived and promoted to support it.
As for creation, is the basis for our faith simply reading and discussing or debating Bible text vs. Bible text with some science thrown-in for good measure? Or, is it a living, breathing and empowered relationship with a God who loves us so much that He gets very personal with us and tells us in the Bible how He did it? The first leaves us lacking much where the second focuses our attention on what really matters, gives us peace in the midst of turbulent times and delivers us to eternal salvation.
“The problem with debates about things like old/young earth creation is that it cannot be settled with the evidence available to us, so we must rely on a degree of faith.”
What? Do you have any idea how ludicrous / entirely wrong that is? There is an *overwhelming* amount of incontrovertible, empirical evidence that the earth / universe / humans / life in general / etc is *orders of magnitude* older than the ~6,000 years, give or take, that young earth creationists purport to be true.
Sweet mercy, you people. I’m just about speechless here. What’s next? That there’s no evidence either way that modern medicine works better than prayer?
I am so incredibly thankful each and every day for having awoken from the stupor of this utter nonsense.
Tim,
A wise man knows something about how much he doesn’t know. That is the point of the essay. Scientists are prone, like everyone else, to think they know something when they really don’t. It’s a cautionary tale.
But that’s *not* the point of your essay, William. The point of the essay is one giant logical fallacy, well-meaning though I’m sure you are: it’s pointing out variances in scientific knowledge across time, wielding the existence of those variances to cast doubt well beyond the scope of their applicability, and then concluding that gaps and variance in scientific knowledge necessarily invalidate the entire body of evidence within a given domain.
Lest I sound presumptuous for telling you what your own essay means, you helpfully and succinctly make your entire point right here: “Dr. Hoehn’s Natural Clocks are really imaginary clocks. Artful constructs drawn out of man’s imagination.”
No, they’re absolutely not imaginary clocks. By disingenuously replacing “imperfect” with “imaginary,” you’re suggesting those measures are devoid of evidentiary value. That’s not correct.
Take the genesis of tornadoes as an example. Ancient societies believed they were literally spun up at the hand of angry gods. Today, we STILL don’t know precisely how tornadoes form (I’m a weather nerd, so you’ll just have to trust me there). But that doesn’t mean what we DO know about them is invalid — today, we know that it involves a combination of rotating updrafts, deep layer bulk wind shear and atmospheric instability.
What you’re suggesting is that since we still don’t know what causes tornados, the notion that angry gods craft them with their hands remains an equally…
aaaand character limit.
…remains an equally valid theory. Obviously — or at least as *should* be obvious — that isn’t the case.
To bring this back to your examples in the article, the fallacious logic involves orders of magnitude. The variance in the overwhelming body of scientific evidence for an old earth involves arguments over how many billions of years it is. There is no evidence, no gaps in knowledge, that can even be stretched to suggest that the world is instead a mere few thousand years old. Ergo, to say both positions are of equal merit given what we know/don’t know is simply untrue.
Tim,
Imaginary clocks, in this sense; the measuring of time is a function of imagination. Only man measures time as an abstraction. The ambiguous, anthropomorphic, phrase “tell time” implies we make clocks speak to us. We do; in our imaginations.
I think my essay pays proper respect to both dendrochronology and glaciology as sciences that can measure time backwards, sort of. It is as much an art as it is a science. The further back they try to go the more assumptions they accumulate and their postulates become corrupted. they are no longer measuring anything, because they are no longer certain what they are observing. Scientific method is a narrow way of knowing things. In science, and in every field of learning; it is easy to see what you expect to see.
I know you imagine you know the real point of my essay. You might merely be seeing in it what you expect to see.
“Scientists are prone, like everyone else, to think they know something when they really don’t.”
William, I trust that you would include Preachers and Theologicrats among “everyone else”?
Having spent virtually my entire life studying science, and living with Dutchmen and Preachers and Tehologicrats, I would not want to wager which would have greater difficulty in admitting they are wrong.
It is said that Science advances over the dead bodies of scientist who were unwilling to admit their errors. Religion advances if ever, over the dead bodies of centuries or millennia of disciples of Theologicrats, who remain unwilling to admit the errors of their spiritual forefathers.
Foregoing comment was a reply to William Abbott.
I was specifically thinking of religious people.
Sweet mercy indeed, Tim. What strange pathology would cause anyone self- respecting person to waste time trying to reason with adults who believe in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny?! Really Tim, you and Bugs need some
serious couch time.
Nathan, sorry to cast ripples in your otherwise pristine echo chamber here. You’ll have to pardon me if the pursuit of truth is something I’m passionate about — I assumed you people would perhaps be able to relate.
Tim,
Since you are claiming to be passionate about your pursuit of the truth, how can you be so adamant in the denial of that which you cannot falsify?
Frankly Tim, your stance toward that which you cannot falsify actually appears somewhat hostile; and if so, would run counter to a passionate pursuit of the truth.
No need to apologize, Tim. I have an uncharitable streak that leads me to rather enjoy watching Flatlanders floundering in a multi-dimensional universe they try to navigate with epistemological tools that are quite inadequate to the task.
You see, many of us who you think operate in an echo chamber – because we share a Judeo-Christian world view – see you reasoning within an echo chamber as well. The difference is that we accept life as finite creatures in an infinite universe “superintended” by an active Designer in whose image we have been created.
Ironically, you seem to reject, at least methodologically, a God that cannot be reduced to an extension of your own reason and experience. Yet at the same time, you reject the God of others on the grounds that he is simply the product of their own reason and experience, albeit highly flawed. So your rejection of a “knowable” God ends up looking very much like a tautology.
Stephen Foster’s question is spot on. So the question remains – Why would an ostrich think an eagle might relate to the ostrich’s pursuit of a truth which insists that what the eagle sees and experiences doesn’t exist, because birds can’t fly.
Nathan,
“No need to apologize, Tim. I have an uncharitable streak that leads me to rather enjoy watching Flatlanders floundering in a multi-dimensional universe they try to navigate with epistemological tools that are quite inadequate to the task.”
And no need to explain, because it’s long been apparent to me that you’re one of the least charitable, most arrogant people around here. 🙂 What a nasty, haughty post — I actually laughed, which ain’t common before my second cup of coffee. Thanks for that.
You’re an exemplary Christian, Nathan. Never change.
“incontrovertible, empirical evidence”
Tim, you need to distinguish between empirical observations, and inferences based upon such observations. Counting tree rings or snow/ice pack layers under a microscope, or measuring radio-isotope ratios in rocks or carboniferous materials, are empirical observations. Interpreting them to indicate ages-before-present are inferences. I am not saying these inferences are valid or invalid, but they are not “incontrovertible, empirical evidence”.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-greenland-ice-sheet-melt-20160414-story.html
William, you can debate what is the cause, but I hope you do not deny that Greenland is now warmer than at any other time in recorded history, going all the way back to when the Vikings first began to raise sheep there.
And did you know that the maximum coverage of the ice pack in the Arctic ocean this past winter, was one of the smallest if not the smallest, ever observed, going back to the first attempts to explore a “northwest passage”?
Foregoing comment was a reply to William Noel.
http://www.clim-past.net/8/1881/2012/cp-8-1881-2012.pdf
For those with the patience to read it, this paper has a lot of detail regarding the state-of-the-art in counting accretion layers in ice cores. William Abbott is correct that this is a much more difficult process than counting tree growth rings. Nevertheless, there is a lot of interesting information trapped in ancient ice layers and the results are not to be taken lightly.
Single ice cores spanning tens of thousands of years have been recovered and analyzed with a fair degree of repeatability in the results. There are published claims of recovering hundreds of thousands of years from cores taken in Antarctica. However as the paper shows, as you go deeper and deeper, the layers become more and more compressed. Consequently the level of confidence in the ability to recover and reconstruct discrete years significantly diminishes. What you are left with is inferences regarding climate conditions over ranges of years that are estimated from the layering structure that can be recovered.
By comparison, the structure of the cellulose in an undecayed tree, remains quite stable as the tree grows, and as the wood ages after the tree is felled (by humans or by nature).
I agree with William on some things and with you on others. William is absolutely right when he is essentially saying you can’t be sure about anything outside of your observable records because no matter how you want to slice it if you do that you’re never basing anything on fact but speculations. I for one believe the Bible is correct in the young earth theory and to many people put their trust in what they observe and then speculate on in the world because when people go out to “observe” these hings in the distance past things the results are messed with by entities which have an agenda to spread lies (and I’m not talking about the people doing the tests). However, I’m with Jim on global warming not because of the data which can be disputed but historical satellite photographs in conjunction with ground observations. Human kind is destroying the earth just like the Bible predicted in Revelations and God is going to come back to punish those who are knowingly contributing to that problem. On a side note the biggest destruction mankind is producing (also predicted in the Bible) is coming is the death of everything in the oceans. That isn’t being caused by the warming of the planet but because of the coal plants acidifying the oceans which is in turn is going to kill the smallest creatures in the food chains. But I don’t fear this because I know who I serve. Sending love in Christ
Mike,
I really do not know how old is the earth.
Could you show us where in the Bible it says how old is the earth?
Jim,
Short comment on Arctic Ice. No doubt we have been looking at record low ice in the Arctic the last few years. Realize that the records are satellite records and date back only to 1979. The record low years are 2012 and 2007. 2015 was not a competitor. I include a link to the Arctic sea ice charts.
In the 1920’s ships traveled through the Northwest Passage for the first time. There are newspaper accounts from that same time which speak about the disappearing ice pack. I include a link to those articles also.
The waxing and waning of Arctic ice may be caused by phase changes in the oceans. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) are multi-decadal temperature variations and have extremely significant effects on weather and climate. Many meteorologists suspect the ocean temperatures and currents have something to do with the ice loss in the Arctic. There is no corresponding ice loss in Antarctica.
I do think increasing atmospheric CO2 has some warming effect. For a variety of reasons I doubt it is very significant.
William Noel is right about surface temperature data tampering by the USHCN (US Historical Climatology Network.) 40% of the records have been adjusted upwards.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
Jim, The chronology of Genesis tells us quite plainly how old the habitable earth is. It says when the flood took place, that Noah and Shem were still alive during Abraham’s lifetime,and other dates of interest.
The chronology of the divided kingdom was also rejected as nonsense by most OT scholars until Edwin Thiele spent a few years harmonizing them, embarrassing the critics,and demonstrating that they are, in fact. quite accurate.
Seems strange that the chronology of the divided kingdom, rejected as nonsense, was actually quite accurate, while the Genesis chronology also rejected as nonsense is actually that.
I’m not even mad, just speechless with fascination, that somebody can reject the entire sum of human scientific knowledge in deference to a 2,000 year old fairytale of dubious origin.
Absolutely among the most fascinating things I’ve ever encountered.
Hansen,
I am well aware of the work of Thiele and I hold it in high regard. And if you bother to study his work carefully as I have, you will find that he drew heavily from non-Biblical sources (including Assyrian chronology) to help him sort-out the erstwhile unsolved puzzle.
Which actually goes to illustrate the point behind my original question. Nobody can tell us how old is the earth from Bible sources alone. Why? Because the Bible does not directly answer this question. So every time I ask the question, I get answers that knowingly or unknowingly, depend upon “secular” sources of information.
Serious students of the Bible do not agree how to interpret the “begats”. And different ancient Bibel manuscripts have different versions of the ages in the “begats”. And Hansen, to build your answer by appeals to the “begats” you just depended-upon A very long chain of inferences about how to interpret this evidence – hardly the “thus saith the Lord” we generally like to see to establish sound doctrine.
In the end this argument is not about whether to accept information from “secular” sources, but from which “secular” sources to accept information. It all comes down to an argument over which sources we choose to believe.
Hansen,
“The chronology of Genesis tells us quite plainly how old the habitable earth is.”
At best, the “begats” in genesis can help us determine (via a chain of inferences) how much time elapsed between the Fall of man and the sojourn in Egypt. Even Biblical literalists appeal to other sources and assumptions to determine how long it was from “the beginning” to the Fall. For example, neither the beginning of the First Day nor the end of the Seventh Day is described in the Genesis creation narrative. Your chronology must make assumptions about these questions, since the Bible does not directly address them.
Different Bible chronologies produced by equally literalist Bible scholars, differ on when the Exodus occurred. Secular history and archaeology offer no help, because to this point no extra-Biblical evidence for the Exodus has been found. Again, you are heavily dependent on your assumptions and inferences.
Likewise the Bible does not directly date anything after the Returns from Babylon. Even a Bible literalist must appeal to secular history to establish these dates. Ditto for attempts to date various events recorded in the bible narratives of the life of Christ and the lives of the Apostles. The variants of the Roman calendar we use today, were established and maintained almost entirely by “secular” governments. The Bible narrative largely ends with the death of Paul, so any attempts to say when the NT events occurred rely upon “secular”…
Jim, According to Dr. Thiele, he arranged his chronology of the divided kingdom period independent of outside resources and then, after harmonizing the supposed discrepancies, caused by different scribal practices, confirmed his records by consulting certain dates well established in other Near Eastern chronologies.
It’s inaccurate to suggest that he was dependent on extra Biblical resources. A few of the important NE chronological records were actually discovered after Thiele’s first edition and only confirmed his findings or brought adjustments of a year or so.
“The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings” is loaded with Bible references as are his articles found in Ministry magazine. His study focused on the chronology of Scripture, not the ANE. He set about to harmonize the Scriptural accounts with themselves, not extra biblical records.
I have no doubt that he was well acquainted with extra Biblical data but I seriously doubt that he used it to construct his chronological harmony, unless he simply lied about his methodology, which he described in his book.
Smack in the middle of the Kings, which critics described as completely unreliable vis-avis chronology, is a reference to the time of the Exodus– 480 years before the temple was built by Solomon. Since Thiele basically proved that the chronology was impeccable, how did they get that one wrong and everything else right?
Jim, Scripture says Adam lived 130 years and gave birth to Seth. From there, the records are fairly easy to follow up until the time of jacob’s death. The flood took place about 1650 years from the time of Adam’s “birth.” Abram was born about 1950 years after Adam existed. It’s fairly straightforward for those who actually believe the Bible.
Hansen,
You have completely missed my point. The “begats” might tell you how long it was from Adam to Abraham, but they cannot tell you how long from Abraham to the present. Likewise Thiele’s reconstruction Of the kings of Judah and Israel can tell you long it was from Solomon to Zedekiah, but they cannot tell you how long from Zedekiah to the present.
To assert anything about the span from these ancient events to the present, you must appeal to extra-Biblical “secular” sources. For this purpose Thiele used Assyrian chronology because he could correlate it with the later kings.
Jim, The chronology of Scripture gives a fairly accurate record of how much time elapsed between Adam and the present, if you choose to believe it:
The pattern of reigns in Thiele’s book “resulted from a quest to ascertain whether or not the numbers found in Kings could be brought together into some harmonious arrangement of reigns,and whether or not such an arrangement once produced was in harmony with the established dates of Near Eastern history.” Thiele begins with the first reign after Solomon [Rehoboam]and confidently sets the date as 930 bc. Solomon began the temple 480 years after the Exodus? If you do believe that, we now have an accurate record reaching to the descendants of Jacob, who was removed from Abraham by only Issac.
Eve gave birth to Seth after Adam had lived 130 years. That’s what the Bible says. From there some basic arithmetic will carry you to Noah, the flood,and Abraham, the Egyptian captivity and Exodus and then 480 years to Solomon’s temple.
Acts names many of the Roman rulers Paul encountered, Felix, Festus, Agrippa, various Caesars. The dates associated with these individuals are well attested in extra Biblical literature,including Josephus and Roman historians; no mystery here.
Thiele was amazed by the accuracy of the numbers in Kings, preserved and transcribed for ~2000 years, virtually error free but I’m supposed to believe that the rest of Scripture is what?
“The chronology of Scripture gives a fairly accurate record of how much time elapsed between Adam and the present”
And then Hansen followed-up this statement of how to estimate the number of years from Adam to the Babylonian captivity. But without recourse to Persian, Greek, Roman and more modern secular historians, this tells us absolutely nothing about how long ago dais captivity commences. And even Assyrian chronology does not help because the Babylonians captured Nineveh before Jerusalem. Even attempts to date the various Returns rely upon Persian records because the Bible records are relative to the accession years of Persian kings.
So I am still waiting for Hansen to offer the first clue regarding how to date Old Testament chronology relative to the present, using only the Bible? And the New Testament offers very little help because it contains very little chronology. For example, virtually all attempts to date the birth of Christ rely upon Roman records regarding the provinces of Syria and Palestine. The Bible does not say how old was Jesus at His Baptism or His Crucifixion. Traditional estimates of 27 and 33 years are almost certainly wrong, because traditional estimates of His birth are probably off by a couple of years? There really is no way to know without reference to Roman records, and then we are left with about a two-year window of uncertainty.
Jim, I see more clearly what you are saying. It may well be that without cross referencing extrabiblical sources, it is impossible to express the time of an event in language we understand. That was not, however, the original issue to which I objected.
Here’s what you said”I am well aware of the work of Thiele and I hold it in high regard. And if you bother to study his work carefully as I have, you will find that he drew heavily from non-Biblical sources (including Assyrian chronology) to help him sort-out the erstwhile unsolved puzzle.”
I reject that. Thiele specifically said that he set about trying to harmonize Scripture internally and avoided benchmarks set by outside sources. He did not draw heavily from outside sources to sort out the unsolved puzzle. No doubt his research was informed by outside sources. He may have gotten his ideas about different types of reckoning from outside sources but once he had those ideas, he relied upon internal evidence to harmonize the apparently conflicting numbers.
I do agree that because of the different way we record time now it’s hard to express Biblical dates without reference to extra biblical sources. The decree taxing all the world from Caesar Augustus is likely well attested by extra biblical sources, as is the decree[s] driving Jews like Priscilla and Aquilla from Rome or the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians or Romans.
It’s more an issue of nomenclature than chronology. China still uses 2…
Mike,
Don’t believe the claims about ground-level temperature measurements supporting claims of man-caused global climate change because the records have been doctored. The Inspector General for the National Weather Service has confirmed that the “records” released to support the assertion were altered from the original records to show increases.
The best data set for measuring temperatures around the world is collected by NASA weather satellites. The Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama in Huntsville is the primary contractor to NASA for collation and analysis of the raw data and has been since NASA began collecting surface temperature data. The original records show only a .1 degree celsius increase globally over the past 15 years where the released data sets show up to 1.8 degrees celsius rise. More than that, the NASA data shows that when the temperature goes up in one place, it goes down in others to produce a net zero result.
The theory of global warming is a political agenda using contrived, junk science to support it.
William Noel, I would like evidence that the inspector general of NWS has confirmed that records have been altered to support the climate change theory. I’ve been Googling it, and finding nothing.
Loren,
There isn’t any. But you don’t need evidence to make a claim around here — all you need is your own certainty.
Loren,
With respect, I would strongly advise you not to hold your breath while waiting for confirming documentation along these lines.
The photos tend to tell a pretty convincing story however I don’t get wrapped up in alarmism from it and again that isn’t the biggest ecological issue which the world is facing. The oceans becoming more acidic is and it is a direct result of greed. I watched one documentary where the people clearly weren’t biblically minded but they described the oceans having the ph properties of the blood of someone who had recently died (sound familiar?). That is what is going to kill the oceans off not that overfishing has left much there anyway at this point (my wife loved to eat Mackerel but you can’t find it anymore except at extremely high prices and that is a reality of what is happening in the oceans with overfishing) . Human’s have forgotten their first commission from God which is to care for the planet and they have turned to destroying it systematically out of greed. God and the angels are watching it all and like it says a time will come to destroy those who destroy the earth. Sending love in Christ.
Loren,
Search USHCN US Historical Climatological Data Network CONGRESS. You’ll find several references to the controversial downward adjustments to to historical temperature records.
Loren,
On related matter. I posted a comment today with a couple of links in it and it said it was awaiting moderation. This has happened before and my comment was never seen again. I know there is nothing inappropriate with these comments, but something happens to them.
I will try posting just one link to about the USHCN data adjustments.
http://principia-scientific.org/breaking-new-climate-data-rigging-scandal-rocks-us-government/
William,
That nonsense was widely debunked by people who actually know what they’re talking about:
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/25/steve-doocy/foxs-doocy-nasa-fudged-data-make-case-global-warmi/
But… you know, go ahead and keep cherry-picking. That’s cool (no pun intended).
Tim,
This is not the proper forum for an extended debate about about the extensive changes the USHCN has made to the historical temperature record. I am drawn into it reluctantly. William Noel made reference to it and others here could not find what he was talking about. As I explained to Loren, I’m reluctant to load a post up with links because wordpress kicks it into moderation and the comments seem to disappear.
I invite you to investigate it yourself. Its easy. Paul Homewood a bookish numbers, wonk/blogger, took Steve Goddard’s discovery and really built on it solidly.
The original data hasn’t disappeared, but it is no longer used as official. Official historical temperatures have been cooled. This makes the present look warmer in comparison. Here is a link to some altered Nebraska Data: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/cooling-the-past-in-nebraska/ Look at it yourself. I have no agenda here. just data.
While the conversation is about tree growth rings and their implications for how long life on earth may have existed, the invisible elephant in the room is how we understand inspiration of scripture.
We live by faith, Paul wrote to the Romans.
When we start to live by our understanding with or without the help of our understanding of scripture, we are living by understanding, not by faith.
Paul reveals the temporal nature of all understanding, including knowledge, spiritual practice, and prophecy. And in their stead Paul declares faith, hope, and love as the only enduring true reality of life. (1 Cor 13)
For Paul, scripture is inspired to be “profitable,” as he told Timothy, “for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.’ Scripture is profitable because it chronicles humans relentlessly loved by God across the millennia for our inspiration regarding the certainty of God’s love for his creation and literally personified by the promise-fulfilling life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The inspiration of scripture is confirmed by faith and made real only in the actions of our individual lives as God’s creation, saved by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Gods’ son.
The only measure of a Christian is their love one for another.
And we only love because we sense the other is loved as we are.
Eternally.
In order to understand and compare “scientific” measurements, one must know what instruments were used and how they were calibrated. Satellite measurements of temperatures at the surface of the earth, depend upon the physical phenomenon called “black-body radiation”. The physics of “black-body radiation” applies across a very broad range of “temperatures” and gives highly repeatable results if properly done.
Modern temperature measurements performed by direct contact, generally employ semiconductor devices called “thermocouples”. These are now small and cheap and readily available. They give less accurate results and across a much smaller temperature range compared to the satellite-based instruments. Nevertheless they are a significant improvement over the fluid-filled bulb-based thermometers that preceded them.
Fluid-filled thermometers suffers from linearity issues across extended temperature ranges, as well as being dependent on the eyes of human observers. Laboratory-scale thermometers can be quite accurate but they are impractical for field use.
One of the first actions of what we now call government weather bureaus (in the 1800s), was to standardize measurement instruments and procedures. We still have samples of these various standardized instruments, and we can directly compare the relative performance across different generations of these instruments, under identical conditions.
(continued)
Many modern instruments are designed to be auto-calibrating via a variety of techniques. And the necessary corrections are applied “automatically”, generally by embedded software. These techniques have become so reliable that even laboratory users seldom have to worry about how to calibrate their instruments. Such was not the case when I began to work in school labs. One of the first things we had to learn was how to calibrate liquid-filled bulb thermometers and other instruments.
The “adjustments” or “alterations” in historical weather measurements, referred elsewhere on this web page, have been applied based upon direct side-by-side comparisons of the measurements taken by different types of standardized instruments and calibration procedures tested under a variety of precisely controlled conditions. Unless one makes such adjustments, there is no way to make meaningful precise comparisons between data taken with different kinds of instruments using different methods.
Notably for this discussion, it has been known for many years that in direct comparisons between the fluid-filled bulb thermometers formerly used by weather observers, and the “black-body” measurements taken by satellites, the classical thermometers generally produce readings 1 to 2 degrees higher (depending on ambient temperature) than the present “black-body” standard. That is why the historical data is adjusted to permit meaningful comparisons.
Jim,
The raw temperature data from the past is what it is. Adjusting the recorded temperatures downward because you assume they ought to be isn’t science.
The only reason to make an adjustment is Time of Observation Bias (TOB). It has to do with infrequently measured stations always being measured at the same time. TOB adjustments would never account for the massive quantity of adjusted records and they would tend to have a neutral effect anything.
No one that I am aware of within the NOAA has offered your ideas as an explanation.
William,
Before you jump to that conclusion, you might want to investigate the procedure for yourself. For example, the NWS standard weather observer procedure is to take a reading in the shade, 5 feet above the ground. A satellite does not and cannot measure ambient air temperature 5 feet above the ground. If you have used a thermometer outdoors you know the temperature is usually different on the surface vs 5 feet into the air.
This is but one example of the issues involved. Someone who is only accustomed to one procedure or one instrument will not understand the issues related to repeatability across different instruments and different processes.
Rather than dismissing this out-of-hand with a “nobody else” claim, why don’t you check your facts and see if I might be correct? I have spent a lifetime working in physical sciences and electronics and I know a fair amount about what happens when you use different kinds of test equipment and different procedures, and then try to compare results. And I have taken black-body and fluid-bulb measurements in the lab, as well as fluid-bulb, bi-metallic spring and thermocouple measurements in normal use, and I have designed equipment that uses thermocouples for temperature monitoring and control.
For those who lack the patience or inclination or knack for wading through technical details, next time you talk to someone at NOAA ask them whether they have compared measurements taken by a human observer using a standard observer mercury thermometer, with measurements taken at the same place and time by automated monitoring equipment using a thermocouple? And then if they think they understand weather satellites, ask them how a satellite can measure ambient temperature 5 feet above the surface of the air or water?
You might also ask your favorite observer how well their standard mercury bulb thermometer works in polar regions or really cold winter locations? I did winter mountaineering in my youth, and I lived a fair piece of my adult life in Minnesota.
Do you know about Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE)? Do you know about linearity of CTE near the freezing point (-38F/-39C for mercury) or boiling point (<150F for ethanol at STP, lower in the vacuum tube of a thermometer) of a liquid? I have seen that little ball of mercury shrivel-down until it doesn't even rise out of the bulb. I have seen the bulb shatter in really cold weather, as temperatures rose and the gradually-expanding mercury struggled to rise back into the orifice at the bottom of the tube. All instruments have their limitations including mercury and "spirit" thermometers. Your typical mercury thermometer will seize-up in really cold weather, whereas your typical "spirit" thermometer will develop bubbles in really hot weather.
“wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/22/the-metrology-of-thermometers/”
Not a simple problem 8-).
Jim, we are talking about records. Decades and decades worth, you can’t recalibrate the data. The recorded temperatures are simply what they are. You can’t adjust them to read lower because you think they should be lower. That’s why Congress is asking questions.
I have no argument with you over the complexity of thermometers
Hansen,
I agree with you. You can date world history using the bible’s chronology. Bishop Ussher did it in the early seventeenth century. The problem of dating the Exodus and the length of time encompassed by Judges is a question of accuracy not ability. There are some gaps and contradictions within the texts. From King David on we date with good confidence usually confirmed with outside sources.
Numbers from antiquity are notoriously suspect. How many died, how many fought in the battle, how many marched, how many were being ruled over, you can’t trust the numbers. As in the essay, counting and chronology has always been hard. You can’t trust numbers in Ancient History.
How reliable are the numbers in the Bible? It comes down to questions about biblical exegesis. Do we give the numbers in the sacred texts a some elasticity? Do we dismiss them as meaningless? Are they infallibly accurate?
For my own part I don’t want to so mistrust the numbers that I mistrust the sacred text itself. But I do take the big numbers at least with a grain of salt. If it turns out there are gaps in the chronology from Adam to Noah to Abraham my faith in scripture will not fail. I don’t know of errors and omissions, but I’m exegetically at ease with the possibility.
I’m very comfortable with not knowing and very uncomfortable not believing.
WA, Critics savaged the numbers in Scripture prior to Thiele’s work, His Ministry articles ~1960 document the rabid attitude of “scholars” toward biblical chronology, When the writer of Kings says. Solomon’s temple was started 480 years after the Exodus, that includes the period of the judges.
Paul Bork loved that text and with confidence set the date of the Exodus ~1200 or 1250 bc. He may have been off a bit but certainly not the kind of error that leads to deep time theories or an endless Sabbath at creation. Seth was born 130 years after Adam was created; that’s Scripture.
Once you have the date of the Exodus, back tracking to Abraham, Noah, And Adam is simple arithmetic. Seth was born 130 years after Adam came into existence. He was born outside of Eden, so millenia of paradisical languor before the Fall doesn’t fit the biblical narrative.
If people want to just admit they don’t believe Scripture, that’s their business. At least their honest.
SDA atheists? meh
William,
Since you claim to agree with Hansen, would you kindly tell us how to date any Bible event relative to the present, using only the Bible? How can you do this since the self-contained Bible chronology basically stops with the Babylonian captivity? Afterwards the few events that are dated in the Bible are relative to Babylonian, Persian or Roman rulers. To date these events you must appeal to secular history.
Probably the most precisely datable events in the Bible are the visions of Ezekiel, because he identifies them to the day using Babylonian (not Jewish) frame of reference.
Jim,
The bible in itself is consistent as a source for dates. I don’t believe it is perfectly consistent.
As a sacred history I can’t dismiss the numbering as unreliable. If the bible
were merely Ancient History I would dismiss many numbers as guesses or hearsay.
I’m no scholar in this matter. I just think the work of Ussher, Thiele and others is valid. Once you get up to the Davidic kingdom you can corroborate dates with non biblical sources. Roughly that is.
The nature of inspiration is the big question. How inspired is the dating derived from scripture? As I told Hansen, you can’t dismiss dating entirely without doing damage to the history as sacred history.
The point of this essay on dendrochronology is counting things, dating things, is difficult. Biblical dates are not exempt from difficulty.
The difference is ice cores and tree rings are not sacred history.
I did not mean to imply the bible is
That last sentence should have been deleted. I don’t like posting from my phone, I can’t review what I wrote adequately.
“Sacred History,” William, is “Belief History.” Belief is a mental construct to develop and protect a presupposition. There is nothing wrong with that as an expression of faith. In that atmosphere facts don’t matter except as they conveniently coincide with belief.
The word “Sacred,” means holy. It is an assigned label, an opinion, not an intrinsic condition. In your view the estimation of “sacred” elevates belief over reality because you “like” it better. Again, that is fine.
Myths are the dreamland of escape. Your statement, “The nature of inspiration is the big question” is the door to the incubator of myth. Through that door you embrace the question for which there is no answer, only versions, multiple baby myths.
You say, “ice cores and tree rings are not sacred history.” That perfectly illustrates your retreat to the myth of “sacred history” because of your presuppositions. So your myth has become an adult and is in charge of your thinking.
So you can comfortably and appropriately maintain a mythical outlook while you live in the real world, one that doesn’t adopt your myth. Belief is a way of coping, reality is the way of acting.
So William, believe on in your head, live on with the rest of you!
Bugs,
The bible is for some merely a historical source – a historiographical resource. For others, such as myself, the bible is a history in itself. “Sacred” means it is an authoritative history, as I use the term. I do not judge scripture’s veracity, I accept it.
You think this means I am denying reality and instead constructing an alternate realty out of ‘belief’. History is not so simple. The past is not easily or perfectly apprehended no matter how authoritative the history. And every history has an authority; i.e the listener or reader is the ultimate arbiter.
I am not certain I accept the holy scriptures as an authoritative natural history. It seems to me they lose little of their potency if they are not authoritative about natural history. The bible story is about God choosing Abraham/Isaac/Israel and saving Israel through Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. Whether the days of creation were twenty-four hour days is a very secondary consideration. Still, I don’t like the idea of me cutting & pasting up my own personal believable bible.
Bugs, you delight in pointing out my arbiter status in believing scripture. Fair enough. I wrote this essay to try and demonstrate how natural ‘historians’ also see what they expect to see. Glaciers, mountains, earth, rocks, even light itself, speak to them of deep time. It is what they expect the universe to tell them. Their ‘faith’ makes it easy to dismiss any contradiction they may occasionally…
William Abbot, [not sure where this reply will pop up] does the first two parts of Dr. Hoehn’s series have any effect on your thinking? It seems to me they contradict your statement: “. . .natural ‘historians’ also see what they expect to see. Glaciers, mountains, earth, rocks, even light itself, speak to them of deep time. It is what they expect the universe to tell them. Their ‘faith’ makes it easy to dismiss any contradiction they may occasionally…” It seems to me that the “faith” you ascribe to them is the same as yours in the Bible. I don’t think so, their work has presuppositions, but they are amenable to adjusted conclusions based on what the facts reveal.
Though it may appear that I am needling you in some fashion, that isn’t my intent. I am puzzled as to how one maintains your position with what seem to me to be major contradictions. I think I am at a point where I am willing to live with my “distress” and bless you for your profession of faith.
“The point of this essay on dendrochronology is counting things, dating things, is difficult. Biblical dates are not exempt from difficulty.”
Here I absolutely agree with William Abbott. And I find it amazing that someone who does not think we can correlate tree growth rings, thinks we can easily correlate generations of “growth rings” in the “begats”. In the former case we have redundant samples which allow us to check our assumptions and try to eliminate errors. Whereas in the latter case we have only two samples to work from – the LXX and the MT. And where they do not agree (and they have some important differences) we have no way to collect any more samples. And yet some on this web page confidently assert that Bishop Ussher’s count of the “growth rings” was correct, while others equally confidently assert he was off by 200 or 500 years.
Thiele was able to correlate between two different series of “growth rings” by determining that different methods were being used to measure and count them. And he was able validate his conclusions by comparing the later years of his reconstruction with an independent Assyrian chronology, which was measured by well-documented methods. And no, Hansen, we are not merely confronted by different Terminology, but rather by different Methods of measuring and recording events (sort of like the differences between satellite “black-body” observations, vs terrestrial thermometers.
(continued)
“The difference is ice cores and tree rings are not sacred history.”
When I was young we Adventists like to talk a lot about God’s “second book” of Nature. Being Creationists, we used to believe that God spoke to us through the things He/She/They had created. Not to deny that God spoke to us through the Bible (and Ellen also?). But during my lifetime the difficulty of ignoring some of the inconvenient things that Nature seems to be telling us, has become increasingly apparent. A half century of investment in the Geoscience Research Institute has made headway on some of these issues. But on others there has been zero headway.
The same can be said for a half century of Adventist-led digging in Trans-Jordan in an attempt to confirm and hopefully date, events described in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, for which there is no independent evidence. So far we have learnt a lot about the culture of ancient Trans-Jordan, but nothing that would help us answer the original questions that we were digging-for. We used to like to brag that “The Spade Confirms the Book”. And indeed in many cases its has. But when we tout some triumphs of archaeology when we like its ansers, while ignoring archaeology when we don’t, what does that say about us?
I agree that the Bible contains “sacred history”. But I think we must honestly ask whether we are trying to force the Bible to answer questions that represent our own agenda but not Gods?
Jim,
You write, “I agree that the Bible contains “sacred history”. But I think we must honestly ask whether we are trying to force the Bible to answer questions that represent our own agenda but not Gods?” The Bible volunteers to answer a lot of questions; no forcing required. The real question is are we at liberty to reject its answers and still call it authoritative? Can we pick and choose?
You can look on the massive geologic strata of sediments, rock and ash and see evidence of deep time, if you limit your imagination to observable forces. If you choose to imagine cataclysmic forces beyond anything observed it all might have happened rather quickly. After all, one thousand years is a long time also. I can show you comparative photographs of the Nebraska Prairie taken one-hundred years apart where the terrain is so dissimilar you would never believe they are two photos of the same location. Put enough water down the Grand Canyon and forty days later it will be unrecognizable. Use your imagination.
It took multiple generations of men like Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler building on others observations to solve the riddle that no one was asking. One has to ask, did God set the solar system up, just to make us not say, ‘seeing is believing.’ I have to take it on faith the sun isn’t going around the earth. My careful observations indicate it is.
Jim, if we were using the anno mundi reckoning of time, as the Bible did in recording Seth’s birth, it would be plain how much time has elapsed since creation. If you refuse to believe the Genesis chronology,even though the divided kingdom records has been proven remarkably accurate, that’s your own business.
Apparently, you think the accuracy of the Bible has to be ascertained by outside sources. I don’t. In vocabulary studies, I still like to see how certain words were used outside of Scripture; however, extra biblical sources are not the deciding factor in determining what a word means in Scripture.
Extra biblical records also do not determine the accuracy of Scripture. For 50 years or more, the divided kingdom records were sneered at, laughed at, ridiculed, until Thiele shut their mouths.
One writer said that the biblical chronology is so accurate that ANE scholars now use it as a bench mark to scrutinize extra biblical records. If the anno mundi system would have been adhered to, there wouldn’t be discussions like this. If the calendar changes have obscured the length of civilization, it isn’t going to affect my Belief, which I’m not ashamed of.
They are still digging around in Egypt. Who knows what they might find?
Nathan, you may wish to bypass this entry.
To arrive at the correct answer, ALWAYS FOLLOW THE MONEY. Al Gore (who usurped the Father of Global Warming (GW)the father of the internet. His fortune is increased 150-200 thousand dollars every time he repeats his phony GW litany speeches. Dr James Hansen, a fabulist, a first degree wizard of Physics and Astronomy, a bureaucratic huckster who flimflamed the Government/NASA that he was the most knowledgeable person in the world, with regard to Climate changes, and especially Global Warming. In as much as no one could dispute him, as Climatology has no known truths, as here at ATODAY, we are continually debating
the so called Bible Truths. His thesis is that People are the primary cause of the very fragility of our Earth’s climate. That with the population explosion of the past 100 years, to well over six (6) billion souls, that we, with our usage of carbon products and methane gas etc etc, we have caused the ambient mean temperature to advance one ( 1 ) degree celsius, in the past 100 years, and this is about to cause calamitous conditions to Earth’s people to survive, unless the World Government, ie:
the “United Nations” promotes “certain demands” for each National Govt. to undertake. >>>>>>>continued>>>>
>>>continued>>>> Global Warming>>>> Folks, this is a Global Scam. There is no truth that people are causing the Globe to heat up. Climatology is far from an exact Science. The Earth has heated and cooled all through history. The Earth’s Poles alternate with periods of hot and cold. When one pole gets colder, the other warms.
Prior to more recent excuses for warming was that Carbon Dioxide, CO 2, was the problem, with too many people exhaling. This is now debunked as studies now reveal that CO 2 doesn’t build up in the mesosphere and ionosphere once it reaches 30%?? It’s not hotter today than at other times in the Earth cycles. Temperatures and
Solar cycles follow each other very closely. Numerous studies find that a correlation
exists between Solar variation and Earth’s climate, according to the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research, in Lindau, Germany. They are making statements that 90%-100% of Earth’s Scientists are People are causing Global Warming, and its
propaganda, untrue. Max Planck Institute/ It’s not an exact science, Sun spots and Flares are a great influence, but you could double the Sun spots, but if one major volcano erupts it would counter every Sun spot for years; also you could increase
Sun spots, CO 2 emissions, and no volcanos erupting, but if the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is at the further distance, it could cancel out every thing else. Hmmmmm.
Who do you trust.
Often overlooked is the fact that we are still recovering from the recent Ice Age of about fifteen thousand years ago. Without the warming that thawed it, there still would be no Great Lakes, New York City would be on top of the south section of a glacier extending to the north pole. In other words the mile thick ice sheath would still be covering a large percentage of the earth. Sea shores would be way out yonder. Ice ages have come and gone uncaused by mankind. There is reason to believe that at least once in earth’s history the entire world was an ice covered snow ball.
My son has flown me over some of the Alaskan Glaciers. We landed on a moraine at the bottom end of one. It is clear they have receded, or we couldn’t have landed there. The cause of that shrinking is the benefit for the rest of the world. Southern land mass glaciers are gone.
In the early fifties the fear mongering touted in the media was that we were entering a new ice age. Some scientists watching the suns current behavior believe it to be on its way.
The other inconvenient truth us, I believe, all preventive efforts of mankind are feeble and to be effective, would require the entire cessation of carbon dioxide production. In less than a year the world population would be on its deathbed. Rabid environmentalist welcome this scenario and accept the demise of mankind as the best solution.
A warm world is better than a cold one for human life.
Bugs-Larry,
Your comment is one of the most sensible things I have read on this page. Despite the fact that I differ with you regarding a few minor points. I grew-up in Michigan, surrounded by the Great Lakes and all kinds of evidence of land-forms sculpted by ice almost everywhere I went. (The notable exceptions were those wonderful sand dunes shaped by wind, but of course the masses of sand came from rocks ground-up by ice and water.) How anyone who lived there for 20 or more years, could deny ice ages I could not understand, but there were (and probably still are) Adventist and other religious fundamentalist ice age deniers.
However even in the 1950s there was debate about whether the world was getting warmer or colder. You are correct that many scientists were predicting the onset of the next ice age. But a minority were worrying about what would happen if the surviving polar ice masses continued to melt. I remember as a child, reading an estimate that if all the remaining ice on earth were to melt, the oceans could rise as much as 200 feet. Given my childhood “knack” for all things electrical and mechanical, I made a mental note NOT to own property within 200 feet of sea level. I plan to visit the Oregon Coast today, but I do not plan to buy property below 200 feet 8-).
Every reader of this web page should also read:
“www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
Predicting the future is a very risky business.
Earl,
Listen carefully. I agree with you. Nothing catastrophic is likely it come of anthropogenic warming.
There is no doubt atmospheric CO2 has risen from around 300 ppm a hundred years ago to 400 ppm today.
Equally certain are laboratory studies that show CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas.
There is no reason to think the warming will be significant. Even though there has been a lot of chicanery on the part of CAGW proponents.
To dismiss global warning as a hoax is a poor argument when a good one would do better .
Truly, The best argument is the climate models have no skill. They
demonstratrably have failed to predict current temperatures.
have
I find it ironic that Bible literalists would deny that the world will be getting warmer. Revelation predicts that in the future the sun will scorch the whole earth. Sounds like global warming to me 8-)?
And ironic that astro-physicists also predict that in its old age the sun will scorch the earth.
These two groups do not disagree regarding the future, only on how long before it happens.
And ironic that these two groups agree that everything began with a big flash of light, while disagreeing on how long ago it happened.
Earlier I remarked that it is possible to date some events in Babylonian chronology not just to the year but to the day. This is highly unusual and there must be some reason. And there is. Being worshipers of the heavenly luminaries (stars and planets) as deities, Chaldean astronomers observed and recorded celestial observations with amazing accuracy (as did some other civilizations eg the Mayans in Central America). But so far the ancient Chaldeans stand head and shoulders above the others, because they developed a mathematical system for predicting (not just observing) the motions of the planets, that was not excelled in accuracy until the invention of integral calculus by Newton and Leibniz. And this amazing ancient Chaldean system has only recently been deciphered by modern scientists.
Am not denying the Earth doesn’t have alternate periods of heat and cold in it’s history. That there is a delicate balance in it’s influence on the ability of human creatures to cope and survive. Only that the elements that cause the cycles of extreme weather conditions, cannot be caused by mankind’s usage and abuse. God said “replenish the earth and subdue it”. The Creator of the Universe we inhabit was aware the population would grow, to the billions, and calculated it’s ability to sustain the loading. For mankind to attempt to rectify that which the Master designer planned for its existence, is lack of faith in the Master Plan. And if our existence here is not the result of a loving Creator, there is no way man will be able to change the evolution of chance and decay. And if man believes in the imminent return of the Creator God, He plans to destroy the surface and atmosphere of Earth, so why plan to withhold the winds of destruction, by the dismal weakness of mankind to attempt to cooperate in the endeavor of anything, it won’t happen. Do you really believe there would be agreement by Earth’s divisive peoples to respond in a collective action even to repel ET’s????
The ET’s would be welcomed in, as was the Trojan Horse, and as was the recent inundation of Islamic
refugees, including mostly young men (including terrorists) with the intention of breeding with European women, to the long term plan of Islam to subject the world to Sharia law. ” The sons of God saw that the women of Earth were fair, and took them wives of all which they chose “. Thus leading to the annihilation of all people on the Earth, except 8???? (There were giants in the Earth in those days).
Muslim men “sons of God”? Really?
DD, OF OURSE NOT. didn’t indicate they were. Just the latest invasion of innocence.
Earl, I didn’t think so. Was just curious why you connected the “sons of God” Bible text with the Islamic refugees, that’s all.
Hansen,
The birth of Seth and the death of Adam would be the only two events in the Bible that you could claim use the “anno mundi” reckoning of time. Where are “anno mundi” in the births of Enoch or Noah or Abraham. There is no such concept anywhere in the “begats” or elsewhere in the Bible. The dates for Adam and Seth are more accurately “anno Adam”. Everything in the “begats” is described relative to the births of various Patriarchs.
“Anno mundi” is a concept that you and others like you are imposing upon the text. It is nowhere present in the text itself. Show me even one verse after Day 7 that says that anything happened in such-and-such a year after Creation. That verse does not exist in any of the numerous Bibles I have read, except in the study notes. It is a human interpretation and not part of the text.
Jim, Once anno mundi begins with Seth, the begats offer a clear line of time to the birth of Abraham. You reject that as an absurdity because you believe in science. I guess or don’t know what “begat” means, which strikes me as strange. If you could explain the problem with begat, perhaps I could better understand you.
If we drew a straight line from the creation week until now, how could we indicate by dots along the way when certain events took place? I maintain that the bible itself tells us where to place the dots in relation to the creation week. One of the very important waymarks is the text in Kings which tells us the construction of Solomon’s temple took place 480 years after the Exodus. That is a very significant text recorded in a book which has been proven remarkably accurate vis a vis chronology.
The Jews were quite careful about timekeeping. They may not have been interested in heavenly times but they were very interested in days, weeks, months,and years. Daniel knew when the 70 years of captivity expired, John knew when the 70 weeks of Daniel were about to expire. They knew when the Sabbath was, the Day of Atonement, the Jubilee, etc.
I’m sure the Babylonians were very nice people in many respects.
correction: believe in science, [not “.”] I guess …
Sorry Hansen,
None of the “begats” use “anno mundi” reckoning. They are Patriarch-relative, not Creation-relative narratives. You are doing arithmetic to convert them to “anno mundi”. You are of course free to do that, Jewish Rabbis and later Bishop Ussher did the same thing. But that is not how the “begats” are actually written in the Bible.
Now about Daniel, he thought the 70 years of Jeremiah began when he was taken to Babylon in the first deportation. That is clearly the assumption in his prayer in Daniel 9. But careful study of Jeremiah shows the 70 years began with the destruction of the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem at the time of the third deportation. Daniel did not live to see the end of the 70 years.
This is a recurring problem with human attempts to force scripture passages into our own preferred contexts.
Jim, When Scripture says Adam lived 130 years and begat a son in his own image, that sounds like anno mundi reckoning to me. The begats which follow are relative to Adam as well as each other.
1 ¶ In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of Median descent, who was made king over the kingdom of the Chaldeans—
2 in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, observed in the books the number of the years which was revealed as the word of the LORD to Jeremiah the prophet for the completion of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years.
So your saying that Daniel didn’t know what he was talking about?
Hansen,
Two final remarks and then I shall let this lie. I generally set my default “retry count” to three and I think there is not much point in further belaboring these points.
In the case of Adam, the 130 years may be both “anno Adam” and “anno mundi”. The similar statements regarding other “begats” are NOT “anno mundi” unless you do arithmetic. And that arithmetic ins not actually in the Bible. It is the calculations of various interpreters, including you.
In the case of Daniel, go do your homework and then come back and tell me when you think the 70 years prophesied by Jeremiah, actually ended. My reading of Jeremiah says they commenced with the destruction of Jerusalem ca 587 BC, and would have ended ca 517 BC which is about the time the Second Temple construction commenced. Daniel was deported to Babylon ca 605 BC and the events surrounding Daniel’s vision in Chapter 9 took place ca 539 BC. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
I’ve come to the calculated, Biblical conclusion that from Adam until Christ there is approximately 3500 years. Therefore we are now at approximately 5500 years.
As far as “tree-ring” dating: Do they take into consideration the years where rainfall may have exceeded the normal yearly average rainfall? I would imagine trees growing a little faster in those conditions? Or, how long was it after creation that changes to the environment affected the atmosphere and all plant life? Before any environmental changes occurred, plant life would have grown immensely faster than they do now.
Also, noting William Noel’s comment on April 14, 2016 at 5:47 am, I agree the importance of any Biblical discussion should focus on Christ. However, I do think timeline, in relation to Christ coming in the flesh, is significantly relevant in understanding God’s eternal plan of Salvation; which includes the culmination of this physical creation–which is only temporal.
Good article, William.
“I’ve come to the calculated, Biblical conclusion that from Adam until Christ there is approximately 3500 years. Therefore we are now at approximately 5500 years.”
This made my day. 😡 Thanks DD.
“As far as “tree-ring” dating: Do they take into consideration the years where rainfall may have exceeded the normal yearly average rainfall?”
No they don’t. None of the scientists with PhDs who’ve studied the topic for their entire careers have ever considered that before. You’ve *literally* just turned an entire domain of scientific study on it’s head.
Tim, where is your support for your idiotic statement? “None of the scientists with PhDs who’ve studied the topic for their entire careers have ever considered that [where rainfall may have exceeded the normal yearly average rainfall] before. You’ve *literally* just turned an entire domain of scientific study on it’s head.”
Obviously your sarcasm detector isn’t functioning this morning, but that aside, this is AToday — you don’t need evidence to make a claim around here. 🙂
OK Tim! True and true, that one zipped over my head without detection!
Tim & Bugs,
/sarc
That is an HTML tag that turns off the sarcasm. When you finish with the sarcasm type: /sarc
its an inside joke and commonly used on wordpress comment blogs
and a good idea too. Sarcasm, especially good sarcasm, is easily misunderstood
“you don’t need evidence to make a claim around here.”
Yes, Tim, just like the evidence you have when making all your fabulously wild claims. I get it, you’re more intelligent than some of us here — I’m speaking for myself, of course.
Instead of mocking someone, why not ask: How did you come to that conclusion?
But, that would be below you — how would anyone know more than you?
“Yes, Tim, just like the evidence you have when making all your fabulously wild claims.”
I really hate to bite, because I think you’re a little slow, but… precisely what claims — plural, apparently — have I made that you’d describe as “fabulously wild” (as opposed to simply fabulous, which I’d gladly accept without further debate)?
Tim, you’re not about to engage in a meaningful discussion with me, are you? It may not work, as I’m a “little slow” and you may not comprehend my lowly state of mind, especially while you sit up there on your horse looking down at me. Come down and walk with me; I’m only a child entering the Kingdom of God.
Refuting what others are saying without producing evidence supporting your own understanding, in any given subject, are wild claims plucked from the imaginations of your own mind. All I’ve seen coming from you are objections.
Let’s see if you can redeem yourself by answering my question further down the page?
As you say: no offense.
Paleoclimatology is very dependent on dendrochronology. All sorts of climatological effects are observed, or thought to be observed, in tree ring studies. Dendrochronology is at the center of the ‘climategate’ email scandal of 2009 and Paleoclimatologist Michael Mann’s famous “Hide the decline” Global Warming Hockey Stick graph of world temperatures. Suffice it to say, Paleoclimatology is a science where the observers have been observed seeing what they expect to see, even when it is obviously not visible. These paleoclimatologists have ‘tricks’ to use their own words, to make the graphs show what they think it should show. The hockey stick graph switches silently from dendrochronological data to land-based thermometers at the end to push up the end of the graph.
There are two creation stories. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. They are different.
Genesis 1:11-12 and 1:26-27 Trees came before Adam.
Genesis 2:4-9 Trees came after Adam.
Genesis 1:20-21 and 26-27 Birds were created before Adam.
Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 Birds were created after Adam.
Genesis 1:24-27 Animals were created before Adam.
Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 Animals were created after Adam.
Genesis 1:26-27 Adam and Eve were created at the same time.
Genesis 2:7 and 2:21-22 Adam was created first, woman sometime later.
Which one is correct?
If you believe in a young earth you must accept a fairly literal interpretation of the first 11 chapters of Genesis, but that also means that you must reject the science that gives us the evidence for an old earth, hence, the anti-science expressed by the YEC in this Blog. On the other hand if you believe in on old earth you do not accept a literal interpretation of the first 11 chapters of Genesis. What it comes down to is one’s view of the inspiration of Scripture. All the Bible says is that the Bible writers wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t tell us what that involved. Billy Graham saw the Bible writers as Gods secretaries taking dictation from God. The SDA church’s position is the writers were thought inspired. I don’t see a lot of difference between the two views. . The latter allows the writer to express the thoughts in his own words but the thought is from God.
The idea of thought inspiration is a hypothesis that demands testing. If the Bible is indeed thought inspired wouldn’t Bible writers say the same thing but maybe in different ways? Fortunately different Bible writers wrote on the same subject which allows us to compare the words or thoughts. So What does the evidence say? Consider Matt. 27:3-8 and Acts 1: 16-19. Both describe the death of Judas. Either Judas died by hanging or he fell and his guts broke open but not both. The thoughts are not the same. One or the other story and possibly both are incorrect.
This one example destroys any claim to Biblical inerrancy and infallibly. The Bible is a human document, and nothing human is inerrant or infallible. To impute inerrancy or infallibility to Scripture is a form of idolatry. The whole idea of Biblical inspiration needs to be rethought.
“There are two creation stories. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. They are different.”
Ppriest, does the Gen. 1 account describe the creation in more detail, that is, in chronological order; where Gen. 2 concentrates on the human aspect and God’s involvement with man?
Take for instance Gen 2:19: All it describes is how God formed every beast , and that He brought them to Adam to be named. It doesn’t state when God created the animals.
Also, Gen. 2:21 describes what God did to bring Eve into existence, it doesn’t say when.
Personally, I don’t see two creation accounts. I think they are one and the same account of creation, only vary in detail.
Ppriest, yes, agreed. Personally believe the Bible may not be more than 30% Inspiration of the Godhead. With 100% of Inspiration guide of the Holy Spirit of God. The 70% of content being fables, desires, meta-phony, allegories, intentional deceit and outright prevarifications of the scribes.
Bugs,
History is studied to understand the past. We want to understand the past so we can understand how we got to here in the present. Histories that short shrift ideas; that focus too exclusively on what happened, are never satisfactory. It is beyond history to predict the future. Understanding the past is more than challenging in itself.
Natural History is fictional. What I mean when I say fictional is, the rocks and trees and ice are never quoted, they have never spoken, the record of the natural past contained within them is not a language to be translated or mistranslated, there are no ideas moving the creation of these records. In the same way a novelist makes his characters speak, when we study dendrochronology, et al, we make the tree rings or the ice ‘tell time.’
The wood and ice are records of something that happened in the past. The ‘when’ of what happened is an idea. The farther back in time we move the ‘when’ in natural history the more assumptions we must supply. We assume we know what the conditions of the past were that shaped the objects we observe. At some point, the law of probability makes it likely that our assumptions are making our conclusions untrue. Science is very resistant to assumptions.
Continued –
When we study human history we try to understand the ideas that moved the behavior. To understand first what happened and then perhaps why it happened. The writer of history uses sources and his work in turn becomes a historical resource, all to the end that others might understand the history of what was said and done.
The scriptures claim to be an authoritative history of God’s choosing Abraham and by extension his people Israel. In the gospels, Jesus of Nazareth is portrayed as believing the scriptures to be an authoritative history of God and Israel. He is portrayed as Messiah, crucified and risen from the dead.
My dilemma is I believe Jesus Christ is the Jewish Messiah. The only Jesus of Nazareth we can know is the Jesus portrayed in the gospels. We have no other sources. The gospels are our only historical resource and they claim to be authoritative, just like the scriptures Jesus believed have always claimed to be authoritative. If I am to believe in Jesus Christ and His God, I must accept the fact He precludes me from judging the evidence in scripture. Epistemologically – It is all or nothing. I have no determinant role to play in judging the authoritative, i.e. sacred, history.
Jesus Christ was told what to believe by scripture, and His beliefs derived from scripture. I want to emulate Him. So I too believe the bible as an authoritative history. I do not judge it; it judges me.
“My dilemma is I believe Jesus Christ is the Jewish Messiah. The only Jesus of Nazareth we can know is the Jesus portrayed in the gospels. We have no other sources. The gospels are our only historical resource and they claim to be authoritative, just like the scriptures Jesus believed have always claimed to be authoritative. If I am to believe in Jesus Christ and His God, I must accept the fact He precludes me from judging the evidence in scripture. Epistemologically – It is all or nothing. I have no determinant role to play in judging the authoritative, i.e. sacred, history.”
That’s not a dilemma. That’s a tautological irony.
You believe in Jesus Christ *because* of the Bible, and you accept the “fact” that He precludes you from judging the “evidence” in the Bible, because you believe in Jesus Christ because of the Bible, and you accept the “fact” that He precludes… aaaaand ’round and ’round we go.
You might instead consider that the same god who gave you a rational mind would want you to use it.
Tim, do you “believe” or accept (extra-biblical) world historical accounts dating back 2000 years?
Tim,
My belief is not a tautology. Jesus Christ is a Torah Scholar. He obviously teaches and believes all of scripture is true and authoritative. If I believe He is the Messiah, I believe the Torah in the same manner as Jesus Christ.
I believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Not because the bible tells me to believe He rose from the dead, but because the weight of historical evidence indicates He rose from the dead. It is belief in the resurrection as a fact that makes believing in Jesus Christ reasonable.
So I believe in Jesus Christ because He rose from the dead. Not as you say, because of the bible. I read and believe the Scriptures as authoritative because He read and believed them that way.
If you don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, it is perfectly reasonable to reject the authority of scripture. I certainly wouldn’t hope in Jesus Christ for anything. He failed, He was false, if He didn’t rise from the dead.
William,
I’m not trying to be offensive, but there are so many errors in reasoning and embedded tautologies in the above that if the logic were diagrammed, it’d look like some knockoff Olympic logo. Either you’re lying to me or you’re lying to yourself — I believe you’re trying to have an honest exchange, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter.
It’s hard to know where to begin, but the heart of your post is your position, communicated with a straight face apparently, that you’d believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ even without the Bible. That’s categorical nonsense, and I’d be seriously entertained by any effort to claim otherwise.
Your core tautology here is as follows:
Scripture is authoritative and true –> Scripture says Jesus rose from the dead –> Jesus is the messiah –> Jesus teaches scripture is authoritative and true –> Scripture is authoritative and true –> Scripture says Jesus rose from the dead –> Jesus is the messiah –> Jesus teaches scripture is authoritative and true –> Scripture is authoritative and true –> Scripture says Jesus rose from the dead…. and on and on we go.
You casually state “weight of historical evidence” in reference to your belief in Jesus having allegedly risen from the dead. I know if pressed you’ll reference the lack of attributable remains, but beyond that, precisely what do you mean by “weight of historical evidence” that doesn’t involve scripture?
Tim,
I mean precisely the empty tomb. Most critical scholars and apparently you also believe the tomb was empty. The disciples behavior indicates they believed Jesus rose from the dead. Their behavior does not belie a conspiracy to steal His body and perpetrate a fraud. If it were a perpetrated fraud they would not use women as primary witnesses because the law would not accept the testimony of a woman. Even the disciples doubted the women’s eyewitness accounts. To preach the resurrection first in Jerusalem, the location of the both the crucifixion and the burial, and the locus of power that would resist their preaching is best explained by real belief that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. Their subsequent success and fearless preaching is unlikely to be motivated by fraud. We know that thousands, many thousands of Jews in Jerusalem believed the resurrection had occurred. The tomb and and His chief detractors were both in Jerusalem. Surely they would have refuted the resurrection if they could have.
Instead we have attestation of the Jewish authorities to the empty tomb. The Roman guard that was placed at the tomb and their embarrassing and highly unlikely admission that the disciples had stolen the body away was obviously contrived. The Toledoth Yeshu, (a compilation of early Jewish writings), alludes to the stolen body allegation, as does the record of a second century debate between Justin Martyr and the Jew Trypho.
DD I showed you the difference. But let me reiterate: Genesis 1:11-12 and 1:26-27 Trees came before Adam. Genesis 1:20-21 and 26-27 Birds were created before Adam. Genesis 1:24-27 Animals were created before Adam. Genesis 1:26-27 Adam and Eve were created at the same time. Genesis 2:4-9 Trees came after Adam. Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 Birds were created after Adam. Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 Animals were created after Adam. Genesis 2:7 and 2:21-22 Adam was created first, woman sometime later. To say something was created before Adam in chapter 1 then to say it was created after Adam in Genesis 2 is contradiction. The Bottom line is something cannot be created before Adam and then created after Adam. They both cannot be literally true at the same time. To take your position you have to ignore the before Adam in chapter 1 and the after Adam in chapter 2. That is being dishonest with the evidence. Your literal interpretation of Genesis has blinded you to the evidence. The scholars that I have consulted at LLU assert that Gen. 1 and 2 were written by two different authors at different times.
Ppriest,
You’re missing DD’s point. The details don’t matter, because God. You’re wrong because you’re getting tripped on on trifles like details.
ppriest
The scholars that I have consulted at LLU assert that Gen. 1 and 2 were written by two different authors at different times.
The LLU scholars are making an assumption.
Ppriest, does Gen. 2 give a chronological account? Gen. 2:7 states God formed man. Gen. 2:8 states God planted a garden east of Eden and there He put the man. It details other aspects of creation, not another creation.
You wrote: “Your literal interpretation of Genesis has blinded you to the evidence.”
Not so fast, Ppriest. “By faith we understand that the worlds were frames by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” Heb. 11:3.
Are we discussing the physical natural world/creation, or the mind of man?
Ppriest wrote:
“The Bottom line is something cannot be created before Adam and then created after Adam. They both cannot be literally true at the same time.”
Of course not, but that does not mean they cannot both be true. You need to consider the literary practices of the ancient Hebrew, which are still widely used when telling stories in many languages today, including English. The recapitulation of a story often describes the main points in a different sequence than the chronological narrative. Now we can debate which if either of these narratives (if either) describes the actual sequence of events. But that does not mean that one of them must be wrong. In this particular case, the second narrative describes the home of humans, probably in the order that a human would notice things.
And by the way, our chapter divisions do not come from the original documents but were added only a few centuries ago. The first creation narrative concludes in the first few verses of Chapter 2 with the creation of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the culmination of the first narrative. Marriage is the culmination of the second narrative. The author(s) ordered these two narratives in the manner that best supports their conclusions.
“The scholars that I have consulted at LLU assert that Gen. 1 and 2 were written by two different authors at different times.”
A conclusion at least as speculative as others on this web page that you (in some cases correctly?) deride. There is no way to nullify this conclusion and therefore I am reluctant to dignify it with the appellation of “literary hypothesis”. And by no means unanimpous among current “Theologicrats” at LLU. It is not only “science deniers” who cherry-pick their experts. So also do “faith deniers” 8-).
Here are some more differences that I didn’t mention. Genesis 1 God speaks the world into existence, in Gen. 2 he plants a garden and fashions humanity out of soil and from a rib. The two stories also use two different names for God. Elohim in Gen. 1 and Yahweh in Gen. 2.
“The two stories also use two different names for God. Elohim in Gen. 1 and Yahweh in Gen. 2.”
Not quite, Ppriest. Genesis 2 introduces [another] attribute or aspect of God’s Spirit; it adds: Yahweh (Self-existent, or Eternal) to Elohim; declaring Who God is, that is, the “Self-existent, Eternal God”, plural— God is Spirit.
DD If you are asserting that the sequence of Gods action represents a chronological account, then the sequence of Gods actions in Gen. 1 also represents a chronological account, but the final chronological actions of God in Gen. 1 was the creation of man after the creation of everything else. The first chronological action in Gen. 2 was the creation of Adam then he created everything else, woman was created last. Adam was created before everything else.
Both stories assert God as Creator. Gen 1 is saying worship God because He created it all. Gen 2 says the same but adds a rational for the fall of man. But Gen 1 is a different story than Gen 2. The text you cite simply reaffirms the assertions of Gen. 1 and Gen. 2, God is the Creator. It has nothing to do with what we are discussing. We are discussing the difference between Gen. 1 and Gen. 2. I am asserting that they are two different stories that contradict each other. You are saying they are one and the same story but you are ignoring the before and after contradiction.
Sorry, Ppriest, I don’t agree with your assertions that:
1. Gen 1 and 2 are describing two different creations.
2. they contradict each other.
I just don’t see it.
What I see are two accounts of the same events, albeit in summary form detailing what took place in the first week of creation. They do not contradict each other.
Are you approaching the Creation Story in relation to the spirituality of man, or the physical world/universe? I can see both. This is why many are at odds with each other when discussing the creation story in Genesis. Some are looking at it from the physical aspect, others spiritually. Some only understand it physically, while others understand the connection the physical and spiritual share in this created world. There are both physical and spiritual aspect within creation. Both go together. If you don’t have the Spiritual aspect within you, neither will you see the physical creation around you. Both were made by the same Word of God. Otherwise we wouldn’t relate to the world around us. No contradictions. No confusion. This is why Paul says: “20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,” Rom.1:20. We only need to make sure we build on that “sure foundation” which the LORD has laid in our hearts—because the Fire will prove its quality, soon enough.
Ppriest wrote:
“the final chronological actions of God in Gen. 1 was the creation of man after the creation of everything else.”
Actually Chapter 1 ends before the end of the first Creation narrative. The final chronological action of God in this narrative is the Sabbath. And in this narrative humans (not gender-specific) are created before the Sabbath.
“The first chronological action in Gen. 2 was the creation of Adam then he created everything else, woman was created last. Adam was created before everything else.”
Actually the second Creation narrative culminates with the union of Adam and Eve in the first marriage. The whole point of the narrative is to describe the origins of marriage and the family. So things are described in the order that humans would have experienced them, not the order of their first occurrence.
“Both stories assert God as Creator. Gen 1 is saying worship God because He created it all.”
That is indeed the implication of the Sabbath which is at the beginning of Chapter 2 rather the end of Chapter 1.
“Gen 2 says the same but adds a rational for the fall of man.”
This is a very strange claim. Was it the creation of woman, or the institution of marriage and the family, that provoked the fall?
I say NONSENSE! At the end of Chapter 2 God has set-up the original couple for success, not for failure. How bizarre to claim that the actions of God are the “rational” for the fall!
If the literal interpretation of the creation stories is questionable how can you be certain the 4 genealogies recorded in chapters 4, 5, 10, and 11 are literally true. I don’t think you can and be honest with the evidence at the same time. The first and third are segmented in form (a family tree) the second and fourth are linear in form. The genealogies in 4 and 5 are actually versions of the same genealogy. The names in the list are almost identical and are nearly in the same order. It is reasonable to infer that these genealogies were prepared by two different people. Gen 4 inserts anecdotal details that lack chronology, while Gen. 5 provides chronology but lacks anecdotes. These differences reflect two different strategies for describing what the writers thought of early human history. The long life spans of pre-flood biblical heroes has a parallel in the Mesopotamian king lists. Also notice that the final digit for each age is 0, 2, 5, or 7 in all but one case. The probability of random ages like this is 6.87 x 10¬-8. Also notice that the seventh person in the Mesopotamian king lists (Enmeduranki) did not die but ascended in to heaven. Gen. 5 reports that the seventh patriarch “Enoch walked with God: then he was no more because God took him.” (NRSV) These genealogies are not dealing with a literal history. Rather they are dealing with Israel’s response to the Mesopotamian myths that surrounded them.
Wow! You really got preachy on this one. First, the issue of truth, the way I see it, true and false are logical opposites. That is, every truth claim must have the possibility of being false. The only way to know if the claim is false it to test it. If a claim lacks testability its truth cannot be known. It is just an opinion without any truth value. Second, Dr. Hoehn presented two essays on evidence for an old earth. The first involved dendrochronology and the second involved ash deposits. In response to the dendrochronology essay Mr. Abbot presented dendrochronology as bad science. His point was that because it was bad science it doesn’t count as evidence for an old earth. Others jumped on the anti-science band wagon in the context Global warming. Mr. Abbot and others are a YEC. That belief is based on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, 2 and the genealogies of 4, 5, 10, and 11. Consequently, YEC’s must reject any science that supports on old earth, hence, the anti-science expressed in this blog. I have been reading SDA anti-science literature now for 5 or so decades. At first I bought it, but as I continued to study I begin to see that it was wrong. I hold a doctorate in science education. I know the care, the checking and rechecking of data that a scientist must do before he presents his conclusions. Their work must with stand the critical scrutiny of their peers their career depends upon the reliability of their work. Yes sometimes bad and dishonest data gets in.
Ppriest,
I shouldn’t have to quote myself, but here is what I wrote above: “None of this is to say dendrochronology is not science. It is excellent science.” Why do you say, I present dendrochronology as bad science? Why do you misspell my last name? You are a man of science, you should be careful about little details — Like calling me a YEC. What did I ever write to put me in that camp?
My essay is about the epistemological limits of science and the difficulty scientists have in overcoming confirmation bias. I detail a couple of examples. I don’t think any of that qualifies me as a science denier. That is quite the loaded term there. You are equating us with Holocaust deniers, aren’t you? Maybe you have evidence that bearing false witness against your neighbor isn’t really one of the ten commandments? In so many words you assert we ‘science deniers’ are either flat-out liars or ignoramuses. That is not gentle speech. Could you provide some details to back up your accusations?
You write; “all the YEC do is cry ‘bad science'”. As a man of science you should thank the YEC, because you don’t like bad science, do you? Bad science is the enemy of good science, isn’t it? If science is to be self-correcting it needs to be self-critical. You sound awfully defensive. Where’s your humility? You are sure all the numbers are good?
But science is self-correcting. In time those errors will be discovered and corrected. Sciences assertion that the earth is old is based on thousands of measurements. If it were indeed young data would have emerged by now that supports a young earth. However, none has emerged. All the YEC does is cry bad science. Some of the assertions made by the science deniers in this blog concerning Global warming are either flat out lies or total ignorance.
Three testable assertions come out of the creation stories. 1. Man and dinosaurs lived together in the preflood world. Yet not a single human bone or anything human made such as a spear point have been found in assertion with a dinosaur. 2. The Gen. 6 says there were giants in land. EGW says Adam was twice as tall as man living today. Where are the bones of these giant men? 3. Based on the genealogies in the bible on can conclude that the earth is about 6000 years old. Yet there is no physical evidence to support that claim. To the YEC’s I say either produce measurements that show the earth is young or shut up. These tests by themselves show that the creation stories are not factual, they are not history.
Ppriest,
My mother always made us apologize when we said ‘shut up.’ For a writer to say to his critics, “shut up” is shall we say, childish?
I just read this brilliant essay http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress
Take a minute Ppriest and read it. It is spot-on relevant to our discussion about the limitations and vulnerabilities of the scientific method to err.
What I have attempted to do is show that a literal interpretation of the creation is not justified by the evidence contained in the bible stories themselves. The before and after contradiction is there. It is an either or situation. Either God created Adam after everything else, or He created him before. That is the condition that Gen. 1 and 2 sets up. If they were the same story then there should be no before or after. They should agree. This is just more evidence these stories are not factual, they are not history.
I see Christ as a personification of the truth and Satan as personification of the false. In my thinking the pursuit of truth is the pursuit of Christ. Consequently, I have determined to base my beliefs on evidence, because evidence and evidence only establishes truth. The science deniers are more aligned with the father of lies than with Christ.
Ppriest,
Jesus Christ seems to take the Genesis accounts literally, both the flood and the creation of man and woman. Do we have more evidence and are therefore more discerning and wiser than Jesus Christ?
Perhaps the Christ is choosing the second creation story and rejecting the first, when he quotes from it? The second story is a tale of inequality is it not?
One last interchange comment with you William Abbot. Belief is an exercise in mental gymnastics, which you fully illustrate with your tortured justifications to maintain your profession of faith
Christ was a Jew who had a belief anchored in the cosmology of his day. They composers of the Torah and all who valued it, including Jesus, didn’t know what we know now. You say that his reference to Adam and Eve, creation, and the flood verify their physical occurrence. My question to you is, if he was so smart being God, why didn’t he explain those events as allegories which is all they can be?
As to the creation of the world, how do you know it wasn’t created ten years ago and all our experience , tree rings and everything else we perceive as previous were simply implanted as a hologram to fool us? This might be a very very very young universe!
William, it isn’t possible to conjoin belief and facts without serious damage to either or both. Not to mention, yourself.
I’ve been meditating in the Fields of Ambrosia with concern for you in my thoughts. I think I have a good solution as a statement for you profession of faith! It avoids mental double axels, torsioning of facts, and threats to faith
Here it Is: “He said it, I believe it.” The end. That should duct tape the fingers and mouths of all your critics! Me, too?
Someone wrote: “They composers of the Torah and all who valued it, including Jesus, didn’t know what we know now.”
If some are so brilliantly knowledgeable and far wiser than Jesus Himself (the Creator of all things — obviously many doubt that) then how is it they don’t have the answers to something as simple as: What will happen tomorrow? Yes, that’s right, you should know. After all, humans have had “millions” of years to master that “unknown” by now. Check the “tree-rings”, or the fossils, they hold all the answers. Or haven’t you worked out that part yet? What’s the difference, looking back millions of years, or 1 year ahead? Can’t be that difficult a prediction, can it?
Another major issue not mentioned here: If the universe and life was “millions” of years old, who would be behind this suffering and cruel existence? But the true Christian is convinced, within their heart, that the God who created everything is a God of Love. The physical world will finally come to an end; having fulfilled His purpose of salvation and the birth of the Family of God through Jesus Christ His Son. The work He has started will be completed, just as He determined. God is Eternal, but the physical creation is not.
So, all you “old earth, long life” proponents: Where is the Love of God in “millions” of years, and obviously continuous sufferings to come, within that so-called scientific reasoning? No doubt confusion reigns. You can have it.
With computer models we can ‘know’ what the global average rise in temperature will be one hundred years from now in 2116 CE, with 95% probability. How’s that for knowing the future, you ‘science’ denier, you lying ignoramus?
/sarc
“How’s that for knowing the future, you ‘science’ denier, you lying ignoramus?”
William A., your /sarc symbol aside for now, because I can’t see past those critical words without asking: Whose a “lying ignoramus”? The Scientific world denies Christ, so who are the liars?
My apologies DD,
Ppriest called you and me ‘science deniers’ and said we were either flat-out lying or ignorant. I was embarrassed for him. It is uncivil and impolite for him to write such things. I would like him to be embarrassed at himself for doing it. So I paraphrased him in my sarcastic reply to you.
I want you to know I agree with you about science knowing nothing about the future. I think it is extremely foolish for proponents of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming to insist they know they can predict future temperatures with near certainty using computer models that have demonstrably no skill at predicting the future temperatures.
Thanks for clarifying, William A.
I knew where your faith was, but was taken aback by your last few words, not knowing if I was being criticized for not believing in “science”, so to speak. As science is indeed a study of the natural/physical world we live in. But to say I am a “science denier”, meaning, I don’t believe the scientists, absolutely! Because they are unable to help anyone as far as the future is concerned. And that was my point regarding “scientists deny Christ”, that is, with all their findings they are unable to offer any solutions to the mess we now find ourselves in; and getting worse as the years progress (however, I know in Whom I trust). But, why should they have any solutions? Do they claim to have any solutions? I’m sure they do — $$$$$$, keep them rolling in.
I love God’s creation, albeit now it resembles more of a wreck compared to how it must have been originally, not to mention the suffering.
DD,
The fact that you put the word “science” in quotations tells any rational person everything they need to know about you. You’re an object moron — the only reason you fancy otherwise is that you grew up in the pathetic echo chamber that is the SDA church.
You’re an abject moron and you literally wouldn’t survive outside the SDA community. I don’t look down on you for that fact, but I do look down on you for your gross lack of personal insight. It’s really embarrassing to see.
To clarify further, DD (and since autocorrect screwed me there),
It’s actually embarrassing that you even debate here. Everything you type is indistinguishable from something a zombie might hammer out on a keyboard. Your stupid god doesn’t exist and you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about in literally every domain of knowledge in which you feel the need to opine. I marvel, with the open awe and wonder of a child, that you can even feed and dress yourself unassisted.
Well thank you Bugs,
I’ve been praying for you too. You do sum up my position rather nicely. “He said it; I believe it”. But I’m sympathetic, (very sympathetic) to those who can’t believe in Jesus Christ that way.
Now Bugs, I have called dendrochronology an ‘excellent science.’ You aren’t calling me a ‘science denier’ like Ppriest, are you? I do think dendrochronology gets bogged down in assumptions when we start cross-validating fossilized wood and wood fragments. The discipline has its limits. I’m not against dendrochronology, ok? Science is cool, I dig it.
I do think many here at AT are like the Jesus you describe; they have their belief anchored in the cosmology of their day. They believe all the stories. Science is a way of knowing. But it is a very narrow way of knowing. We ask it to tell us all sorts of things that are beyond science’s competence. It is in the end, as you might say, a matter of belief. You say, Jesus… didn’t know all that we know now. Do we really know all that much about the past? Or do we just anchor ourselves to the cosmology of our day? Is the cosmology of our day really able to conjure the future with computer models? I know you are skeptical. You’ve smoked too much ambrosia to be otherwise.
I know enough about historiography to realize it is impossible to really recover the past. Historians are stumbling around in a dark room, on a good day. Natural History’s difficulties are exponentially more…
Mr. Abbott lets go back to your essay and see what you are indeed saying. In your first paragraph you contrast an estimated three trillion trees with a previous estimate of 400 billion trees. Then in paragraph 2 you say, “How could we be so wrong about something so doable as a census, an estimation, of the living trees on earth?” then in you introduce Atmospheric carbon dioxide. You say “How could we hope to make sensible estimates about the carbon cycle using such dramatic undercount of trees?” Then in paragraph 4 you say “For those of us who want numbers we can trust, studies like Thomas Crowther’s are unnerving. If the simplest numbers, concerning the simplest knowables, are proven to be not even close, the totals become a huge caveat about the scientific method itself.” This is anti-science. But you don’t you don’t stop there in paragraph you say, “The study has just demonstrated how unreliable scientific tree counts can be. Now they ask us to believe you can estimate deforestation since the start of Civilization to an accuracy of approximately one percent?” The first 6 paragraphs are about the unreliability of tree counts with atmospheric carbon dioxide. The implication is that science is unreliable. That is anti-science. In paragraph 8 you start your criticism of Dr. Hoehn’s essay and continue that criticism to the end. In paragraph you say,” Glaciologists cross-dating ice cores is much like astronomers mapping Mars’ canals.” This whole essay is a classic example of a
This whole essay is a classic example of anti-science. Any honest reader will agree. You are a science denier.
Ppriest,
The entire readership is comprised of science deniers. If it were otherwise, they wouldn’t be braying about an invisible, magical space zombie who can hear their thoughts.
There you go again, Tim. You don’t have “zombies” in your mind, do you? If you do, you must be one “dead man walking”.
Yours truly, No offense.
Ppriest,
In argument it is flattery to have your ideas restated but not refuted. Did I write anything that was untrue? “…the implication is science is unreliable” Yes, I gave a couple of examples, didn’t I? The examples are true and they show that science has epistemological limitations. That does not make me a science denier or anti-science.
You must must beyond invective, insult, and name-calling and engage the argument. You are belittling yourself, not me.
“Yes, but. . .,” is the last refuge for a “believer” faced with unpleasant facts. Every fact guided enterprise has deviations, variations, contradictions, unanswered questions, gaps even, where “believers” grasp on minutiae as a monster freeze of the threat to their imaginary, fragile tenants. It is a version of the God of the Gaps (God’s existence is verified by the gaps in knowledge, ie., that is where he lives), it is hereby called the Doubts of the Gaps, since that is where he now hides out for the benefit of the Faithful.
Here is what I mean, you say: “I have called dendrochronology an ‘excellent science.” But you downgrade it to remove its threat to your belief by suggesting it is flawed in certain ways, inexact. So you say, yes but, “The discipline has its limits. I’m not against dendrochronology, ok? Science is cool, I dig it.” It’s the same sigh-of-relief dismissal applied by Flood Believers who, when looking at the Grand Canyon layers, joyfully find miniscule problems that are imagined to defeat the Goliath of current explanations.
The safe haven on the way to the last refuge is the device of equation. That is, “You need more faith to believe science than I do to believe Jesus.” If that was true, the recent rocketed camera to Pluto would have landed in the reflecting pond in DC, if it hadn’t blown up on the launch pad.
William, you don’t seem to want to save yourself with the mantra I gave you! The more you explain, the worse for you!
Tim, you lost for words, or don’t you have any answers? Why else would the abusive words start flying against your opponents?
What makes you think I’m an SDA? Also, the “echo chamber” you keep mentioning must be interesting; tell us about it, surely you must have spent some time there?
Also, your claim I couldn’t survive outside of the SDA community — I’m not part of one, except for this forum. So, how insightful of you? Which raises the question: What are you doing here? Unable to survive elsewhere? Do you have something in common with folk here? Are you here to have meaningful discussions with others? Or is it a release for your anger?
As for your “zombie” remarks: interesting outlook you have of those around you. You haven’t watched too many movies, have you?
As for your “zombie” remarks: interesting outlook you have of those around you. You haven’t watched too many movies, have you?
Now, how difficult was it for you to answer my simple question I asked on April 18, 2016 at 1:30 pm? Or, is that because you, an intelligent man doesn’t need to answer someone like me—a “zombie”?
As you say: no offense.
Can we just for a moment get past the” I’m right and your wrong” positions we are taking. It is obvious that this Church is divided on many issues as evidenced by the commentary on this web site. We disparity need a solution. I believe the Bible is divinely inspired, from Genesis to Revelation. I also believe in the process of science. The problem that I have with is that the Bible and Science are in conflict. Peter Enns in his book Inspiration and Incarnation offers a possible solution that we need to consider. The following comments are based on that book. I’m not going to use quotations or cite bible texts because of the lack space and time.
Christ was the word made flesh (Jn.) He is 100 % man and 100 % God. This doctrine was worked out at the council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. Although Jesus was “God with us”, he still completely assumed the cultural trappings of the world in which he lived. That is what “God with us” means. Christ was “made like his brothers in every way” (Heb. 2:17). Christ was born as a first century Jew in palatine. He was raised and educated in the world view that dominated that period. The languages of his time (Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic) were his languages. Their customs were his customs. He fit, he was one of them.
As Christ is both God and Human, so is the Bible. Christ’s incarnation is analogous to the Bibles incarnation. As Christ was one with his time, the Bible is one with the time period in which it was written.
“Christ was the word made flesh (Jn.) He is 100 % man and 100 % God. This doctrine was worked out at the council of Chalcedon in 451 CE.”
That’s correct: ‘It was WORKED out.’ Just as all church doctrines have been formed: by men deciding in council what the Bible meant and from that what should become doctrines of the church that must be affirmed. Of course, each separate division of the church has continued to make its own unique doctrines which must be accepted to belong to that particular group.
There is nothing divine or sacred about choices made for beliefs, only very human, sinful men have decided what you and all the group must believe. Conscience plays no part, but surrendering to the will of the church is the glue that holds it all together. Unfortunately, it really does not attract independent thinkers,
Someone has said: “I contend that we are both atheists….I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
The Christian says: “I’ll pray for you.” Atheist: “Then I’ll think for both of us.”
How puerile and vacuous, Elaine! How many of the great creative and historical achievements of mankind can be credited to atheists? Planned “Parenthood?” Oh yes…abortion on demand.
Fine, I’ll grant you that one. We do have to credit that cornerstone of eugenics to the creative atheist/racist/Marxist genius of Margaret Sanger, the matron saint of feminism. But what else?
Elaine doesn’t need my defense and this isn’t for her.
Wow, Nathan, you are another case of jumping off the trestle in fear of a coming train when one isn’t in sight! What does belief in God have to do with creativeness? How do you know the beliefs or lack of them in any successful person? You have dumpster dived from the trestle into the human trash bin and universalized your display of what you consider garbage. It appears to be an exercise in frantic desperation.
Is it the belief in God that is magic, or just the belief in your version? Not all of the founders of our country, usually labeled Christian, were by your apparent definition. Are their two invisible determinate tattoos on human heads you discern with abracadabra vision for identification of Atheist or Christian?
I don’t believe in your God. I call it Superguy, a human manufactured, barnacle clad idiot. Am I and atheist?
I am a Christian. Not your acceptable version, I’m sure. Anyway, come, join me in the Fields of Ambrosia for R&R to enjoy the effects of peace and love and learn how they dissolve the urge for vilification! You might find god is a mental construct except when encountered through the entanglement of love.
Yes, there are idiot self-proclaimed atheists out there who think their belief in No-God is not belief. But there are “Christian” despisers of atheist who are also idiots in their egoistic claim to “true belief.” I’m not saying our are one, but…
Marx Lenin Stalin & Mao get my vote. They were three creative atheists who knew about ‘tough love’.
Class Enemy ambrosia. Bourgeois ambrosia. Ambrosia filled gulags. Great leaps forward into ambrosia filled graves.
Rabidly atheist North Korea is ambrosia coast to coast.
Come and get your love Bugs
Ambrosia in the gulag. The great
leap forward into Ambrosia.
Holy Mackerel, William! Just when I thought you were going to retreat to your version of the Fields of Ambrosia where can enjoy your mantra in peace, you loudly reveal ignorance of what it is! Your description is babble, has nothing to do with my version. So I won’t explain it to you because you seem to join Nathan in mindless vilifications pasted on all places you don’t understand and on people you don’t like (atheists). You display your choice of human garbage as the normal template for anyone who doesn’t agree with you.
I really don’t comprehend the bile displayed, the dismissal of people you don’t like overlaid with the template of monsters. The concept Jesus taught, love your enemy, do good to those that hate you (inverse, whom you shouldn’t hate) seems to have no effect on your lives, judging by your post here. You practice Paulianity, not the teachings of Christ. They aren’t the same.
I don’t follow your version of faith. I see no reason to, it isn’t the least bit attractive. It appears devoid of Christ’s teachings.
Now I will generously modify my knee jerk reaction by suggesting you and Nathan didn’t intend to be so ugly in defense of your faith. So, since you don’t value the Fields of Ambrosia as a repose of quiet, peace, meditation and love, I will go there by myself and bless you from afar knowing you are actually two very fine people with good intentions. Maybe an alternative meeting at Starbucks for decaf for you and caf for me?
Bugs,
You and Elaine indicated that atheism is of no real consequence. Nathan dissented. I concurred with his descent. It was late. I posted with my phone. But my point is obvious. The Communist revolution has been a murderous nightmare at each manifestation.
The founding fathers of our republic were not atheists. All the Marxists were/are. It’s a requirement; read Marx. It lies at the root of the Marxist weltanschauung and it is the principal reason Marxism always turns out so badly. Everything is based on a mistaken belief that there is no God and consequently no law of God. Society is an infinitely malleable yet predetermined substance that the Marxist revolutionary can fashion into a worker’s paradise. The violent revolution overthrows the Bourgeois, the class enemy, then the dictatorship of the proletariat can begin. Mechanistic biological evolution is Marx’s inspiration. The survival of the fittest and competition between the species/classes and all that.
Ambrosia beetles feed on decay. You can eat them if you are hungry enough. Perhaps the millions of poor zeks found some in the gulag. Or the 35 to 40 million that Mao starved to death with his great leap forward. Maybe the North Koreans eat Ambrosia beetles whenever they can.
Bon Appetit
“There is nothing divine or sacred about choices made for beliefs, only very human, sinful men have decided what you and all the group must believe.”
I like that, Elaine; there is some truth in that. It not only shows how Christianity breaks down, but also the scientific world.
The knowledge of Christ is progressive and human minds are transitioning from a materialistic/carnal understanding of the Eternal God to a Spiritual awareness which surpasses reality—the essence of the awesome Spirit Who created all things; comprehendible only by His intervention.
Mankind, through finite understanding and the imaginations of their own minds have been imprisoned and remain captives, unable to free themselves, detrimentally affecting, not only the world we all live in, but their own souls.
Those seeking answers for their existence through the physical and material world around them; trusting in themselves to find a way out, remain stagnate or, worse still, are moving in the wrong direction—digression, a downward spiral into oblivion.
Although the Bible clearly witnesses to the Creator God; and is in harmony with the physical world we all inhabit, it nonetheless deals primarily with the Spirituality of God and humanity: “The flesh profits nothing”, said Jesus the Christ.
The heresy of Docetism that was addressed at the Council of Chalcedon stated that Christ was 100 % God but only seemed to be human. Many Christians are repeating the Docetic heresy with respect to the Bible. They say it comes from God, but the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away. Scriptural Docetism results in the claim of biblical inerrancy and infallibility and its humanity is ignored. Biblical fundamentalism is Scriptural Docetism. The evidences for the Bibles humanity are everywhere, thoroughly integrated into the nature of Scripture itself. Hence, the different stories for the death of Judas, two different creation stories and the day of Christ’s crucifixion differs between the synoptic Gospels and John. There are hundreds if not thousands of differenced that can be cited. All of these differences are evidence of the Bibles Humanity. Enough for now. If this idea doesn’t have merit on this blog there is no need to continue the discussion. If is does then it needs to be pursued and developed.
Wow, Paul Priest, you are a closet science denier! Your discussion with William isn’t actually a discussion of over “who is right or wrong,” but of which profession of faith is the most legitimate. You have teed off on William Abbot on the golf course of religious discourse, but you have plopped into the quicksand trap beside him, a shocker to him, I’m sure!
You correctly ascertain the “humanity” of the Bible, foregoing the torture of Scriptural inerrancy. But that doesn’t seem to impede your profession of faith in Paulianity, that is the development of Christian thought about Jesus, Paul’s construct. Paul didn’t seem to know (or care, anyway) what Christ taught but fathered Christology as his version of belief.
Your denial of science is frosted over with a finely tuned exception for Pauline God/man. But science doesn’t allow for the mythical claims you and Mr. Paul Saul make about Christ. Science doesn’t allow for those god/man amalgamations that were common in Greco-Roman and BCE popular thought. So you claim that science rules, but sub rosa, not entirely. You say “yes, but” there really is a godman, your science denying profession of faith you deem superior to Williams. Sorry, it ain’t!
So I think you owe William a welcome-to-my–word a version of an apology!
Last sentence correction! welcome-to-my–world
Bugs,
You write: “But science doesn’t allow for the mythical claims you and Mr. Paul Saul make about Christ. Science doesn’t allow for those god/man amalgamations …”
Yours is a true statement. As I have been saying: Science has its limitations. Scientific method is limited to what it can measure and observe. It makes no judgments either way – it is silent concerning Jesus of Nazareth being the God/Man.
But the history that humans write indicates the tomb was empty. If there was a resurrection, then Jesus was a different sort of man. One might believe He was the unique sort of man He claimed to be.
I wrote at the conclusion of the essay: “Dr. Hoehn knows people who look at evidence and see confirmation of their Bible-based belief in a young earth are biased by their belief. Does he know his ‘imaginary’ clocks are also vehicles for confirmation bias for those who “know” the earth is old?”
This is ALL the essay is about. I put forth no evidence the earth is ‘young’ nor did I claim it was young. The essay is a short recitation of some known problems and limitations within forestry, dendrochronology, paleoclimatology, glaciology, and astronomy. I am being attacked as a science denier because there are all sorts of conflicts between science and scripture. So? I didn’t deny that.
All I did was point out science sometimes reaches wrong conclusions. Sometimes it can be massively wrong, not just a little wrong. Bugs goes off the rails putting in quotation marks retorts he imagines I might be thinking. He accuses me of making ‘inexact’ criticisms of the science of dendrochronology because dendrochronology threatens my belief. I did nothing of the sort. My criticisms were specific, limited and true. No one has disputed them. I called growth rings the ‘gold standard’ in time proxies. For the record, natural history does not threaten my beliefs, period.
This week the journal First Things distributed its May edition. In the May issue is an article by William A. Wilson called, Scientific Regress. (Continued Below)
I think several of us want to continue the discussion; and that discussion is mostly about the epistemological limits of science. If you will please read William Wilson’s essay I think we can incorporate his erudition into our debates. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress
Read it, pretty please?
If you can’t get to it, let me know, it my be pay-walled.
William,
I would very much like to continue a discussion about the epistemological limits of
Science. Unfortunately too may others here prefer to discuss the epistemological limits of theology, which is not the topic of your article.
Paul, you refer to the “heresies of Docetism,” another golf hazard for the intrepid religious golfer! Heresy, a divergent from is an opinion developed norm, just speculation. There is no “norm” except one created by human conjecture. In the development of Christian dogma norms became heresy and heresy morphed into norms, all willy-nilly, depending on the mood of authority figures.
Christ wasn’t a Christian, not a systematic theologian, based his “theology” on the Torah text of Leviticus 19:18. He spent his ministry developing and expanding it to define an improved view of God.
The idea of “heresy” a Torah violation in his time, was more elevated in the Christian era as details arose in the uncharted waters of, and the herky-jerky development of, an entirely new theology based on Christ, minus the inclusion of his actual teachings.
So progressions of Catholic counsels convened, heresies proclaimed at the expense of heretics, the unfortunates killed, sent to desert islands and always barred from Heaven. Or sometimes heresies were converted and accepted as “true light.”
Paul you are a heretic by any measure on this forum and your profession of faith suspect by your disdain for Scripture as inerrant. Are there any church councils that might exonerate you? Don’t refer to the one in San Antonio last summer. No hint of hope for you there!
Bugs, your comment is interesting. That is the first time I have been called a science denier. I am not and atheist. Scriptural Docetism is the foundation of atheism. Most atheistic web sites list numerous contradictions in the Bible and then argue that the Bible is unbelievable and consequently there is no God. Their point is well taken if you believe in and infallible Bible.
Many years ago I determined to base my beliefs on evidence. I still stand on that position. Because of evidence I believe in an old earth. Because of evidence I accept the assertion that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Because of evidence I am an evolutionist. I stand on the evidence provided by science. However, science can make no statement about an unobservable God. So why do I believe in God? I believe in God because of the evidence provided by the book of Daniel.
Paul, I agree with your affirmations except for godman as factualized in Daniel. All I’ve seen revealed for our time in that book is the prediction of the nineteenth century Battle of Little Big Horn. Other than that dubious interpretation I find nothing that is factual there. I’m quite aware of the human created god I call Superguy utilizing a barnacle purloined from Daniel as one of millions of anthropomophisms plastered on the poor Fellow. No facts there.
I experience love in my life. Christ recommened it as where God is encountered. Experience isn’t fact based. So mental creations and affirmations don’t apply, are moot. There are no contradictions between science and my experience. God is God without Superguy. “God” exists because I think he does but I can’t describe, have no mental image, and have no descriptive words available for how that fits our physics and cosmology. So I am content to view my experience of love as an entanglement with what I can otherwise not know, perhaps the ultimate allegory. I am shameless science accepter. My understanding doesn’t require Godman, a resurrection, or a virgin birth. I still like those imaginations which won’t forestall my death, but entertain my faith fantasies, until then.
Bugs, you have a very unique way with words. your use of words makes me laugh. You are right by SDA fundamentalist standards I’m a heretic. but that doesn’t matter they through me out years ago. Now I can believe in whatever the leads me. However, can’t get Daniel out of my head. to me quite convincing.
Brother Priest, ‘can’t get Daniel out of my head. to me quite convincing.’ Its not at all clear what part of Daniel you can’t shake, so I will guess its 1844. Well, if you would like a very good summary of the matter, go to http://www.lifeassuranceministries.com and then look for the article by Raymond F Cottrell titled ‘THE “SANCTUARY DOCTRINE” – ASSET OR LIABILITY?’ Here is a doyen of SDA theologians telling in more than adequate detail why he can no longer believe that 1844 fulfills Dan 8.14. And he also goes on to describe how the church was unable, after a specially appointed committee sat for five years to consider the problem, to provide any response, apart from a series of actions which Cottrell describes as ‘obscurantism.’ That’s right, muddying the theological waters of 1844 is the best the church’s theologians can now do. Regardless, you’ll be cured of your Daniel dissonance in a few short pages. Inner peace awaits.
Prophets and other writers have an immediate market they address. Finding long term future predictions in them is an exercise in fantasy, wild-eyed wishful thinking. Daniel has mesmerized the fantasy-inclined throughout its history. The failure of every prognostication has never deterred the endless que of phrenologists who imagine the future by fondling the bumps on Daniels head. Such was the Millerites, certain all their predecessors of divination were uncertain, but not them, who finally found the true meaning of Daniels head bumps.
Serge, forget five years of committee cogitation. Think 172 years of purposeful squashing the truth about the founders untruth on which the Adventist church is built. Inside the soundproof chamber of Adventism the 1844 fiasco is met with deafening silence because it is too painful to face. And it would certainly further fracture the corporation already suffering seismic shocks. For Adventism the pain of cover-up admission is unbearable. So like a heart attack patient stumbling unreleased by doctors from the emergency room (drawn from my hospital chaplains experience) it has forced a happy face while the heart is courting death.
Adventism has traditionally appealed to those seeking rescue from the world of troubles. It’s the apocryphal dream with thousands of years of failure. So, “soon’ is the lasting refuge of hope camouflaging the reality of “never.” And “imminent” Is the palliative for Adventism for its guilt.
Serge, Dan. 8:14 wasn’t the part of Danial that I was thinking about. I agree with your comments. The problem with Dan 8:14 is not Danial but the traditional SDA interpretation of Dan. 8:14. But the biggest problem of all is the churches refusal to acknowledge and correct that interpretation when its error is pointed out. Truth by its nature demands constant criticism and review. The guardians of truth are obligated to create an environment where that process can occur. However, in the SDA church those who have challenged the traditional view have their ministerial license pulled as in the case of Contrell, Ford and others. Contrell was before my time but I was watching the Ford controversy as it was taking place. The pulling of his ministerial license convinced me that the church was not the guardian of truth it claimed be. The church seems to be more concerned with maintaining the status quo than in promoting the growth of truth. I have a take on Dan 8:14 that in I think fits the evidence. But I fill the a rejection of the traditional interpretation is not the same as rejecting the Book as a whole.
PPriest, you mention Adventism’s role as “guardians of truth”, unfortunately another self-assigned title without merit. Understanding Bible Prophecies has been one area many pride themselves in as being masters. But any Spirit led Bible student will quickly realize that any carnally minded and self-seeking interpretation of Prophecy doesn’t glorify Jesus Christ. Prophecy is the Spirit working with our hearts to reveal and glorify Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is our Life.
As you haven’t mentioned what part of Daniel you can’t “get out of your head”, I won’t answer before being questioned. However, many believe Daniel still holds future fulfillments of prophecies; it does, but not in the literal or physical sense. As far as pointing to the coming Messiah, the prophecies of Daniel have all been fulfilled. In relation to Dan. 8:14: changing the 2300 days into years introduces many errors. It also leads to denial of the work of Christ, through the indwelling Spirit of God within the hearts of all true believers (Matt. 3:11, 12).
Bugs, you are expressing your opinion which I get. But you are not giving an argument. If you want to convince me or others then you need to give an argument. You are making an number of unsupported assertions which are unconvincing. Sometimes you sound like the ravings of a mad man. Evidence is the arbitrator of truth. To convince me I need to see your evidence.
Madman? PPriest, I’m bristling with pride since now there is finally something of note about me! As to not providing support for assertions? Elucidate, please! Forums are about opinions. Where facts apply, I don’t supply support in the name of brevity. This isn’t a scholastic enterprise. However, I do fact check assertions before I post my views. So I can produce, if necessary, backup sources. When I am wrong, I admit and correct.
“Not convincing?” I welcome being shown any “number of unsupported assertions which are unconvincing.” All you have to reply to me is write “prove it, buster,” if it is a fact based issue I will supply evidence.
Religious discourse is about opinions, unsubstantiated usually. So, as a happy madman, I have free range to roam until I smash into a bigger madman! Or until assertion challenged to “prove it, buster!”
A last point, I was born SDA, educated in its schools, pastored in its churches, taught in one of its academes, spent four years in chaplaincy watching people die in an Adventist hospital. That is how I spent the first 34 years of my life. So my critique of Adventism is based on experience and firsthand knowledge. If you are the Ppriest (Paul) I think you are, we have experienced some time together drag racing our parents cars in madboy teen years! If I am wrong, unconvincing, drat, another apology is forthcoming!
Brethren, and all, you know what, This is simply wonderful! I’ve come to the conclusion that all this is but the birth pangs of a new day. I had had the feeling that Theology was going out the window, but no. We’re still in business. Moreover, according to DD, we have another 500 years before it all gets wrapped up. Wow!
DD, you should read the book “Six Thousand Years and the Advent Hope”, you’d learn where that idea came from and how it has come down to us.
Clarence, you have singled out my comment among all others here; indicating you have some objections? If so, please state your views for everyone to examine. I have already made it clear, in earlier posts, how I understand through Scripture that there may not be another 500 years before God completes His work and “wraps up” this creation, as witnessed throughout the Scriptures. But you keep pointing out the opposite.
Regarding Bible Timeline, as I have presented, you recommend I read a book to “learn where that idea came from and how it has come down to us”. If you would bear with me a little: could you please summarize what the book says in regards to your above statement? It would save me the time buying the book and reading it—by which time this conversation would be long gone and I would not have the opportunity to present my thoughts on the subject.