Archives for October 2017

Created. Now What? Part 5: Personhood

October 30, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We’re exploring what it means to be in the image of God. The context of Gen 1.26-27 makes it pretty clear that the image includes our dominion over the earth. But is there even more to it than that?

This is where we move from biblical theology to systematic theology: we use our minds to discover and consider ideas that the Bible might not say explicitly, but that are within biblical limits.

Being in the image of God means to resemble him. So let’s sit and think for a bit. In what ways do we resemble God, beyond the already stated resemblance of dominion?

The Bible makes it clear that God is not an influence, or a force, or all that is good in the world. He’s a person. (Well, three persons, actually, but that comes in the next post.) He thinks: he’s self-aware (Gen 15.7), and he knows all things (Isa 46.9-10), and he invites us to reason with him (Isa 1.18). Further, he chooses: he likes some things better than others (Dt 17.1), and he makes decisions to do this or that (Jn 1.13). And he feels: he has emotions, both “positive” (love [Jn 3.16], joy [Zeph 3.17]) and “negative” (anger [Rom 1.18], grief [Eph 4.30]).

God is personal. And so are we. We’re not infinite like him, of course; he’s omniscient, and we’re just sortaniscient, but we do have minds that think and reason, reflecting the way his mind works. (How do we know how his mind works? He tells us, both in the Scripture—we can analyze its logical forms—and in the created world, where we see design elements that reflect his thinking.)

We’re volitional like him as well: we too express preferences and make choices based on those preferences, and on the reasoning we’ve previously conducted. And, as you know, we’re emotional like him too. We have loves and hates, likes and dislikes; we laugh, we grieve, we respond in anger to things we find unacceptable. Like God, except imperfectly.

Perhaps like me you’ve wondered exactly how we’re different from the animals in this regard, animals not being in the image of God. In some animals at least, we think we see evidence of thinking. Our pet dogs, we are convinced, pick up on our thoughts and respond sensibly. A chimpanzee uses a straw to pull termites out of a hole so he can eat them. An orangutan solves a problem to gain access to food. A whale shark seeks a diver’s help in getting free from a net. Bees show their sisters where the pollen is.

And what about will?

Have you ever tried to give a cat a bath?

And emotions?

Dogs rejoice.

Cats hate.

It’s sometimes hard to tell whether these animal behaviors are what they seem, or whether we’re projecting onto them the thoughts and feelings we would have if we were in those situations. Maybe we’re not seeing what we imagine we see.

But it’s pretty hard to argue that there isn’t some kind of thought, or choice, or emotion going on in many of these scenarios. So are animals in the image of God too?

The Bible seems to rule that out. Of course it doesn’t say that animals bear the image, but I think this conclusion is more than just an argument from silence. The Creation account draws a sharp contrast between what has come before—the creation of the earth and of the creatures who populate its air, water, and land—and the creation of man “in our image.” These things are not the same. Whatever some animals do by way of thinking, or choosing, or feeling is qualitatively different from the faculties that God has placed in us. The orangutan may be “thinking” in some rudimentary way, but he is not thinking about the consequences of being created, or choosing to act more consistently with that status, or responding in joyous worship to his creator.

What it must have been like to be Adam or Eve, in God’s image as persons, but with unbroken minds, and wills, and emotions! with thoughts that are reliable, with wills that always choose wisely and well, and with emotions that are servants rather than masters!

Take heart. Our brokenness is not permanent. The day is coming when, by the grace of God, we shall again “be like him” (1Jn 3.2), perfected, glorified, consistent and righteous.

What a day that will be.

Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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Created. Now What? Part 4: Dominion

October 26, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

If the first takeaway from creation theology is that we’re all, male and female, in the image of God, despite our sinfulness and our damaged state, then we ought to figure out what that means.

What is the image of God, anyway?

I think the first hint toward an answer is in the text itself. As God meditates on what he’s going to do (Gen 1.26), and as Moses then describes what God did (Gen 1.28), the text emphasizes a single point: Adam is to have dominion “over all the earth,” including “every living thing that moves on the earth.” He is to fill the earth with descendants of himself (Gen 1.28), and these humans are to “subdue” the earth in their dominion over it.

So what’s that mean?

Several things:

God has given us responsibility for the state of the earth. We’re going to be accountable for how we use it. It’s not our playground; it’s our responsibility. That means we need to use it wisely and, dare I say it, sustainably. We should use our non-renewable resources with a view toward how long they’ll last at the current rate of use. We should prefer renewable resources wherever possible—and we should carefully think through what “possible” means, in both practical and financial terms. We should develop smart ways to conserve and extend what’s on and in the earth. Avoidable extinctions shouldn’t happen on our watch. We’re not drunken sailors—or we shouldn’t be.
And with the responsibility to use the earth wisely is the clear right to use it. Its resources are for our use, within the bounds of stewardship. We can harness the power of its energy sources; we can use our intelligence to make plants more productive or more useful in other ways (natural isn’t necessarily a more moral descriptor); we can domesticate animals and use them for work or for food, even as we care for them and seek their prosperity (Prov 12.10). We can kill them, but we do so humanely and only as needed.

And that brings other issues to consider:

Are there limits to this dominion? Selective breeding? Hybridization? Genetic manipulation? Cloning? What about cloning humans? Does that cross a line? How do we define the line?
Does our dominion extend beyond the earth? Space travel? Mining asteroids? How do we decide?
Does our dominion extend to “redeeming culture” in the Kuyperian sense? Should we embrace all cultural forms as morally neutral and exploit them for the advancement of the kingdom? What constraints would a biblical view place on that kind of activity?

The longer God gives us to steward the planet, the more complicated the questions get. Turns out we need to steward the questions about stewarding, as well as all the other stuff. Being in the image of God is serious business, and it requires us to know more about him than what he has revealed in us; we need to master the revelation he gives in his Word if we’re going to steward our dominion over the earth in ways that consistently please him.

Responsibility is hard work.

Next time, we’ll ask whether there’s more to the image than just dominion.

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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Created. Now What? Part 3: Recognizing the Image of God

October 23, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2

So the first major takeaway from creation theology is the fact that we’re special—specifically, that we’re in the image of God.

Before we get to what that means, I’d like to take a post to note whom it involves.

It involves every human—everyone who’s descended from Adam and Eve.

First, it includes sinful humans, and that’s all of us, of course. Every descendant of Adam and Eve is sinful, in at least three ways:

We’re guilty of Adam’s sin, because Adam was our representative in the Garden. Paul tells us that in Adam, “all sinned” (Rom 5.12)—not “all sin,” or “all will sin,” but “all sinned.” There are different theories as to how that works, but no orthodox theologian denies the fact that the guilt for Adam’s sin has been imputed to us.

What’s that you say? That’s not fair? Sure seems like it, doesn’t it? But let me encourage you to take a look at the whole picture. Adam’s guilt is imputed to you; that really hurts. But your sin is imputed to Christ (Is 53.4-6), and that’s not “fair” either. And the coup de grace is that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us (2Cor 5.21), so that God sees us through Christ-colored glasses.

That’s quite an arrangement.

You can whine about fairness if you want, but this is the best deal in the history of ever, and you’d be a fool not to take it.

As descendants of Adam, we’ve inherited his sinful nature, so that we’re inclined toward sin; we naturally lean in that direction (Rom 8.5-8; Eph 4.22). We like it.

And we sin. Even if Adam’s sin weren’t on our account, we have plenty of our own to answer for. We’re guilty (Rom 3.10-18), as guilty as sin. And if you don’t think so, consider how you’d feel if your thoughts were broadcast, 24/7, to everyone you know. I sure wouldn’t like it. I’m not the only one like that, am I?

But here’s remarkable thing. Even as sinners, we’re still in the image of God (Gen 9.6; Jam 3.9). God’s image in us is so powerful, so deeply embedded by his sculpting hand, that all the sin in the universe can’t blast it away. God is bigger than sin, and so is his image in us.

And one more thing. At the moment he placed that image in us, he said specifically that it involved both kinds of humans: male and female (Gen 1.27).

No, the woman wasn’t an afterthought. That’s ridiculous; God doesn’t have afterthoughts. She’s in the image of God too. I’d go so far as to suggest that neither sex completely reflects the image of God; the image is most clearly and completely displayed by the two together. Which means, I suppose, that the sexes image God most clearly when they’re friends, not enemies.

So why did God delay the creation of Eve? He didn’t say, but as a teacher, I have a suspicion.

He wanted Adam to realize his own incompleteness before he completed him with Eve. He wanted him to treasure what a remarkable and perfect gift she was. So he set him out to name all the animals (Gen 2.19), and here they came, two by two, each male with his perfect female complement. And Adam noticed the obvious: there’s no one like that for me (Gen 2.20). He recognized his need. (Discovery learning!) And when God met that need, perfectly (Gen 2.21-22), Adam burst into poetry (Gen 2.23).

Men have been writing poems to women ever since, with varying degrees of skill. And reception, alas.

Now, how do you treat the image of God?

Well, suppose I’m in London, and I see a bust of the Queen. And I spit on it.

I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining to a lot of Brits, some of them undoubtedly in an official capacity.

And what if I say, “I didn’t spit on the Queen; I spit on a chunk of marble”?

Nope. That excuse is not gonna fly. It’s a piece of marble that looks like the Queen, and that’s the whole point. My treatment of the image can reasonably be taken to reflect my attitude toward the original, the person depicted.

That’s why murder is wrong, you know. Not primarily because the human has a right to life (which he does), but because murder is an attack on, a defacing of, the image of God (Gen 9.6).

So how do you treat the image of God that you see every day? In the rich? The poor? The white? The black? The male? The female? The stronger than you? The disabled? The respectable? The death-row inmate? The countryman? The refugee?

Images of God. All of them. Better not spit on them, or you’re going to have to answer to the Original, and he’s not going to be happy about it.

You disrespect certain kinds of people? Then you need to ask yourself why you despise God so much. You need to repent, and you need to make restitution. You need to repair the damage you’ve done.

Creation theology means that there shouldn’t need to be #metoo hashtags. Or any other campaigns to end abuse, physical or verbal, or even simple disrespect. It’s all ungodly, and in that sense it’s also subhuman.

Get with the species.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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Created. Now What? Part 2: Implementing the Image of God

October 19, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

We’re six days into Creation week. God has issued orders, as a sovereign from his throne, and the universe is running like clockwork.

It’s all good.

But now, on day 6, God changes everything. He comments to himself that he’s about to do something qualitatively different; he’s going to make someone “in our image” (Gen 1.26).

And he rises from his chair.

Why do I say that?

The account in Genesis 1 is tersely straightforward: God makes man in his own image (Gen 1.27), as he had said he would. But Moses, the narrator and cinematographer, has kindly given us a close-up shot of the same scene in the next chapter:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Gen 2.7).

Unfortunately, we’ve become so familiar with these words that their significance escapes us.

This is physical, not verbal, language. God is not speaking Adam into existence; he’s sculpting him, forming him, shaping him, with his hands. He’s “rescue breathing” into him, with his lungs and mouth.

This is shocking language. God is a spirit (John 4.24); he has no hands, lungs, or mouth. What’s this all about?

I’d like to engage in a little biblically informed theological speculation for a moment.

We know that the active agent of creation was the Son (John 1.3; Col 1.16; Heb 1.2). We also know that the Son is the person who later, in God’s eternal plan (Heb 10.5, quoting Ps 40.6-8 LXX), became incarnate, permanently united with a human nature, including a human body, which he retains to this day (Acts 1.11; Col 2.9) and apparently will forever. We’re also fairly confident that Jesus appeared in bodily form repeatedly in the Old Testament, before the incarnation, as the “Angel of YHWH.” In Genesis 18 Abraham has an extended conversation with God, apparently this same “Angel of YHWH,” after sharing a meal with him in his tent—a very physical activity indeed. (Centuries later, Jesus would ask for a piece of fish to eat [Lk 24.41-43], specifically to demonstrate to his disbelieving disciples that he was indeed with them physically.)

So here’s what I imagine.

The Son, Jesus, is the one speaking all things into existence. In embodied form, he rises from his chair and steps to an area of clay. Kneeling, he begins to work the clay with his hands—physical hands—and fashions a body—a recumbent statue—that looks like him. (Isn’t it more appropriate that our body is in the image of the Son’s than that his is in ours?) When the sculpture is complete, he leans back on his heels and surveys his work, not to inspect it for flaws but simply to take joy in it.

It’s good.

But it’s not complete. It’s not human. It’s not alive.

The Son leans over the lifeless form and, placing his lips on the clay mouth, he exhales.

Once? Twice? Several times?

One thing we know. There is none of the desperation that accompanies CPR today: Come on, buddy; breathe for me now. Don’t die on me, man. Breathe for me!

The Son exhales with sovereign authority, and this statue, this clay mass, pinks up. It comes to life.

And there, sitting in the clay, is a living, breathing image of God.

Adam.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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Created. Now What? Part 1: Anticipating the Image of God

October 16, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Once you’ve settled on the fact that God is the Creator, the world never looks the same. A number of ideas immediately become obvious. I’d like to meditate on two of them for the next few posts.

One of the most obvious is that you and I are special.

I don’t mean that in the fawning sense, the way moms tell their children that they’re special. I mean it in the most life-changing way possible.

The creation account makes it obvious.

During the 6 days of active creation, God spends most of the time, metaphorically speaking, sitting in his chair and issuing orders. As I’ve noted before, sometimes he just speaks and items spring into existence: he says, “Let there be light” (Gen 1.3), and there is; he says, “Let there be an expanse” (Gen 1.6), and there is; he says, “Let there be lights in the heavens” (Gen 1.14), and the sun, moon, and stars come into being; he speaks (Gen 1.20), and fish swim in the seas, and birds fly through the atmosphere. Sometimes, when he speaks, he’s acting on things he has already created: he orders the waters to gather so that dry land becomes visible (Gen 1.9), and he causes plants (Gen 1.11) and then animals (Gen 1.24) to spring from the ground.

Through all of this activity (again, metaphorically speaking), God has never left his chair; he has spoken, and his will has been done. But now the story changes dramatically.

To begin with, God speaks, not to command his creation, but in meditation with himself. He says not, “Let there be man,” but “Let us make man” (Gen 1.26). He counsels with himself on what he is about to do.

In the hindsight of the New Testament, Christians see the Trinity here: the persons of the Godhead, perfectly one, speak among themselves, with the Father as administrator and visionary, the Son as active agent, and the Spirit as nurturer and protector. I don’t doubt that all that is true, but the picture here in Genesis, at the outset of God’s self-revelation, is murkier. God is speaking to himself, and he’s using the plural. Is this a majestic king planning his next action, or is it a consultation between or among infinitely exalted equals?

Well, neither, exactly. This is complicated by the fact that God doesn’t think of things, or through things, in the sense that we do. Sovereign and omniscient, he never hatches a plan or finds a solution. So why is he talking to himself, appearing to think through what he’s about to do?

It seems pretty clear what he’s doing. He’s pausing to relish what’s coming. This is not just another step in the long process of creating stuff. This next step is different in kind from what has happened so far; God is about to do something really extraordinary (as if speaking the cosmos into existence in an instant [Gen 1.16] isn’t extraordinary enough!).

In what way is this next step extraordinary? His joyous words tell us plainly: “Let us make someone like us! In our image! Exponentially greater than everything else!” (Gen 1.26a, paraphrased with abandon). May I say reverently, it’s as though he says, “You think that’s impressive? Just watch this!”

And then, metaphorically speaking, he rises, majestically and purposefully, from his chair. No pointing and giving orders now; he’s going to get involved. He’s going to roll up his sleeves and plunge into his creative work clear up to his elbows. Foreshadowing the coming incarnation, he’s going to step right into the middle of his creation.

In the next post we’ll consider what that means.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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Billions of Years? Part 10: Summary and Conclusion

October 12, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

In this series I’ve sought to lay out my reasoning process in continuing to hold to a young-earth creationist position, despite the fact that a great many evangelical Christians have moved to an old-earth view.

I begin by determining the narrative genre of the biblical creation account in Genesis 1-2 and consequently committing to a straightforward (“grammatico-historical”) hermeneutic: I’m going to take it at face value, as I would any other literary work, but with the added recognition that unlike all other literary works, it is the inerrant and authoritative Word of God.

With that foundation laid, I can move to a careful reading of the text and determine its key literary themes. I find that it speaks of direct divine agency, through means of both voice and hands, built around a chronological framework of six days involving “mornings” and “evenings.” Further, I find that chronogenealogies later in the document place the Creation “week” just a few thousand years before the birth of Christ.

I then examine the claims of the popular secular version of the story, alongside the similar claims of its Christian cousin, old-earth creationism. I look for incompatibilities with the biblical presentation, and at precisely those points, I look at the quality of the evidence, since my thesis is that the evidence for a supernatural source behind the biblical account is very strong. To reject the biblical account, I’m going to hold competing accounts to a very high evidentiary standard.

I begin with the currently popular “Big-Bang” model of cosmic evolution. I find its basis to be weak in two ways: first, its proponents confess that the beginning of the model is beyond the reach of scientific investigation; and second—and less importantly, I concede—I have the anecdotal observation that most of its most vocal proponents don’t really understand the model themselves; they are essentially fideists.

Then I move to the Neo-Darwinian model of biological evolution. I find that it requires three things: mutation, natural selection, and eons of time. I find serious evidentiary weakness in all three of these requirements, specifically with the ability of the first two to deliver on the promise of the current complexity of life, and with the scientific basis for the third, given the broad range of ages produced by the many geochronometers available. There’s clearly a lot of room for disagreement in the current state of Darwinism.

Returning to my own academic area, I find two serious theological problems with all of the evolutionary models, including the accommodationist Christian ones: the necessity of Adam’s sin as the cause of biological death, and the repeated New Testament assignation of Christ’s redemptive work to the undoing of Adam’s specific sin and its consequences.

So where does that leave me?

Well.

The Book is divinely sourced.
I’m following all the exegetical and hermeneutical rules.
The alternative(s) don’t meet anything like the evidentiary standard required to set aside the first two points.
Six days.
Then a few thousand years.
Not gonna change. Wouldn’t be prudent.

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Billions of Years? Part 9: Theological Issues

October 9, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

So far I’ve laid out my thinking regarding the biblical creation account and the evidentiary weaknesses in the competing evolutionary account. There’s one more area to address: the theological one.

The Bible’s theology of sin is rooted squarely in Adam (not in Eve, despite the allegations of some feminists—but that’s a topic for another post, preferably in the far, far distant future). According to the Scripture, Adam was a real, historical figure, whose willful sin—disobedience to a specific divine command (Gen 3)—had three results. First, since he stood as the representative of the human race—their “first father” (Isa 43.27)—the guilt for his sin was imputed to all his descendants (Rom 5.12, 18-19). Second, his nature was corrupted by his choice, so that for the rest of his life he was inclined in the direction of sinfulness rather than righteousness. This change in nature has been inherited by all his descendants as well (Rom 3). And finally, as God had warned (Gen 2.16-17), Adam and his descendants became susceptible to death (Rom 5.12).

Consequently, any theory of origins that claims to be biblical must address two theological issues that arise from this biblical view. First, the theory must account for biological death in the way that Scripture does. And second, the theory must account for the redemptive work of Christ, the “second Adam” (1Cor 15.22, 45), in the way that Scripture does. Both of these issues deserve a deeper examination.

Scripture asserts that sin entered the world through human agency, specifically Adam’s, and that death is a consequence of that event (Rom 5.12). Any theory of origins, then, must date fossil evidence—the one thing you can say for certain about fossils is that they’re really most sincerely dead—after Adam’s sin, and thus, obviously, after Adam.

Old-earth creationists would respond that since the Romans 5 passage is clearly talking about only human death, then the fossils in the geologic column would not be included in that passage and thus were free to die millions of years before Adam. But that seems to mean that hominid fossils must not be related to Adam, since they died before he did. Further, it’s not so clear that the Romans 5 passage refers only to human death; Paul speaks elsewhere (Rom 8.18-22) of “all creation” groaning under the consequences of Adam’s sin. My colleague Kevin Bauder has artfully and soberly captured the problem of the old-earth creationist view on this matter.

[Sidebar: This question on the reference of the word death does present an interesting opportunity for meditation. We know that Adam and Eve were free to eat fruit; since digesting a mango would result in cellular death in the fruit, it seems that Paul’s use of “death” in Romans 5 would not include that. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that the tree survives the “death” of its fruit. How about root vegetables? Did Adam and Eve eat carrots before the fall? That would kill the plant, after all. Most young-earth creationists would draw the line not there, but at organisms “in which is the breath of life” (Gen 7.15), which God chose to protect through the flood, by which he decreed that “everything that is in the earth shall die” (Gen 6.17). I’m inclined to think that this definition of death should be considered in interpreting Romans 5. And if that’s valid, then nothing in the fossil record that respired could have died before Adam’s sin.]

The presence of fossils as evidence of death before sin, it seems to me, remains a problem for old-earth creationist.

The second problem is the meaning of the work of Christ. Paul finds the significance of Christ’s work in the undoing of what Adam did (Rom 5.17-19; 1Cor 15.22). If there was no historical Adam, then there’s nothing for Christ’s work to undo, and the evolutionary view simply cannot be squared with biblical theology. Suggesting that Adam is a symbolic everyman really doesn’t get you there; we’d think it was silly if Paul based the work of Christ in undoing the sin of the boy who cried wolf or some other fabulous figure. Nothing in the text of Scripture, in either Testament, inclines us to believe that Adam was merely symbolic. You don’t list symbols in genealogies.

So the significance of Christ’s redemptive work hangs on the question of whether a particular man disobeyed God, and whether we—all—are the biological descendants of that man. I can’t find any of the other choices appealing.

Next time, we’ll summarize and draw some conclusions.

Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 8: The Geologic Time Scale

October 5, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Having considered mutation and natural selection, I turn now to the third leg of the evolutionary stool: the time scales that are necessary for all of this naturally directed change to occur. Evolution needs billions of years, and that’s why we have old-earth and young-earth views.

So is there evidence for the geologic ages, or not?

Well, that’s an interesting question.

There are lots of geochronometers, or ways to calculate the age of the earth. I remember seeing a documentary years ago narrated by Donald Johanson, the paleontologist who discovered Lucy. He talked briefly about the age of the earth and cited 3 different geochronometers, completely unrelated to one another, that triangulated nicely on about 4.5 billion years. I remember thinking, “Wow. That’s really impressive!” So I started reading. And I found out that the geochronometers are all over the place. Lots of them point to 4.5 billion years, yes, but others point to widely differing ages—with a good many well within the range called for by a straightforward reading of Genesis.

Two questions, then. First, why is there so much variation? And second, which ones are you going to believe?

With that much variation, they can’t all be right. So what’s up? A look at a single method might help answer the question. As you know, there are lots of elements and compounds in sea water—most obviously salt, but lots of other stuff too. You can pick one of those—let’s say salt—and measure its concentration in sea water. Then you can try to calculate how much saltier the sea is getting every year—or you can just log your measurements over a period of several years—and you can run that number back to calculate how many years ago the sea would have had no salt in it. That gives you a presumed date for the beginning of the ocean, which is not necessarily the same as the age of the earth, but at least it’ll tell you whether you’re dealing with thousands or millions or billions of years.

[As usual, there’s more to this than what I’ve mentioned here. Salt settles out of sea water in sediment, and there are other variables as well. The method attempts to take all of this into account.]

Well, it turns out that when you run those numbers for different substances—salt, magnesium, calcium, whatever—you get different dates, sometimes widely varying dates. Why?

I think the answer is obvious. There’s an assumption behind the method. When you extrapolate the rate of increasing concentration back into previous years, you’re assuming that the rate was essentially constant over time. That seems to be a reasonable assumption, but it’s an assumption nonetheless; it’s uniformitarianism, which underlies pretty much all of evolutionary thinking.

But imagine another scenario. What would an unusual year—say, a year with a significant flood, even a global one—do to the numbers?

So our calculations are hostage to annual deviations in runoff to the oceans. And the very fact that our numbers differ from substance to substance tells us that the deposition has not been uniform. Our assumption is wrong, and our results are therefore invalid.

So we have dates, “measured” by geochronometers, that are all over the place.

Which ones do we pick?

Ah, there’s the rub. Our choices will be driven by our assumptions. If you’re Donald Johanson, and you’re confident that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, you’re going to select those indicators as examples of how science is done. After all, the ones that take us below 10,000 years can’t possibly be right. They’re statistical outliers. Obviously.

That’s called slanted selection of evidence, and like assuming your conclusion, it’ll get you an F on your freshman research paper.

(Now, this is a sword that cuts both ways. I’m strongly tempted to listen to just the geochronometers that indicate a young earth; I’ve even linked to several above. I need to do the best I can with the data myself, not letting my bias cloud my openness to hard facts.)

But my point is that the geochronometers don’t tell a single story, because we can demonstrate that a great many of them are based on illegitimate assumptions. So why do we insist that only one story can be told, and that the tellers of other stories are mythematicians? And where is the robustness in the evidence that seeks to turn me from the Scripture?

Next time, we’ll touch on a significant theological concern.

Part 9 Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 7: Natural Selection

October 2, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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In the evolutionary system, mutations get you the possibility of change in living organisms. But the changes are random and thus are not directional; they’re not going to get you to anything that looks like a line of development, which is what the term evolution means. You need a mechanism to give the force of change some sort of direction. That mechanism, as proposed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, is natural selection.

Much has been written on the topic, but perhaps the best known is Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Dawkins speaks reverently of the concept, divine in its simplicity: the many random changes that don’t work die out and are thus discarded, while the relatively few random changes that enhance the organism’s ability to survive and reproduce are preserved in future generations. What you end up with, then, is a whole bunch of stuff that works pretty much perfectly, giving the appearance that someone planned that way. But there is no Someone; he’s superfluous.

It’s indisputable that organisms are more likely to survive if they’re capable than if they’re not. So the idea works great in theory—and in practice, up to a certain point. As long as the changes are relatively simple, you can just work your way up the long slow ramp, after the fashion Dawkins suggests in Climbing Mount Improbable. But the data don’t seem to match the metaphor; as Michael Behe noted in his work Darwin’s Black Box, there are many structures in nature that would require multiple changes to occur simultaneously in the organism in order to confer any advantage for natural selection to, well, select. Behe coined the term irreducible complexity.

(And yes, I know that Behe is an old-earth creationist. I don’t think that invalidates his observations to the extent that they are observable and verifiable.)

Perhaps the example most often cited is the eye. To have any vision at all, the human needs an opening in the epidermis; an eyeball, containing a light opening (pupil), a translucent center (vitreous humor), and a light-sensitive retina; an optic nerve to carry the retinal output to the brain; and an area of the brain (the thalamus and, eventually, the visual cortex) to process what’s coming up the pipe. And all that needs to be tied into the circulatory system, or the whole kaboodle shuts down after a few seconds. If any one of those links in the chain is missing, you have no vision and hence nothing worth selecting by the blind watchmaker.

That’s a lot of stuff to evolve at once.

Dawkins has responded to this apparent problem by observing that there are ways to develop increasing vision over multiple generations in small, incremental steps. In what he seems to think is the coup de grace for Behe and his fellow benighted, he notes that some of those steps are observable in nature. But what he does not do is demonstrate that the examples from nature are in any way related to one another (though he does call them “relatives” in passing); he does not demonstrate a chain of development over time. He speculates that many different kinds of eyes developed independently, but again he does not demonstrate a sequence of development for each, or any, of them. In the standard college freshman English course, we call that assuming your conclusion, and it gets you an F on your research paper.

Some old-earth creationists have suggested a workaround for irreducible complexity. In his “progressive creationism,” Hugh Ross posits that at certain unbridgeable gaps in the process—say, the first life, or the first vertebrate, or the first human—God stepped in with an act of special creation. This is a concept referred to as “the God of the gaps,” and to my mind it seems far simpler, if you’re going to bring God into it, to bring him in in the way he described in the first place.

Recall that I’m expecting a high standard of evidence to draw me away from the evidentially supported elevated source of the Scripture. Showing how something might have happened is not showing that it did. And so irreducible complexity remains a problem for the process of natural selection and thus for the evolutionist.

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