How long did it take for mile thick lava to cool? The thermodynamics says over a 100,000 years. Don't invoke a global flood - it won't help on Earth and certainly not on the Moon. Did God create a "mature" Earth? What does it mean for the earth to be mature? One can argue that Adam needed to be mature so he could survive, but this does not make sense for the Earth. Or does a mature Earth/Moon somehow require lava flows more than a mile thick? I think not. Placing such features in a young-earth would be such a gratuitous distortion of the evidence that it should qualify as perjury.

Christians better "invoke a global flood", because that is what the Word of God says. There is no way to take the Hebrew of the flood account (and the other cross-references) and come up with a local flood. Morgan himself is committing perjury against the One he had earlier given lip-service too. We understand now, if we hadn't noticed earlier, that his top-drawer evidences are the assumptions of science, not the Bible. "Has God said?" Does that sound familiar?

At this point someone responded to my posts that I had written so far:

--- B. wrote:

Tom,

Why would saved scientists continue to see the same thing unsaved scientists do? Probably because the research that resulted in the data being studied is testable and repeatable. That's as close to the definition of truth as we mortals can get.

Please look into this more carefully. There are plenty of scientists who differ from the mainstream, saved and unsaved. For starters I would recommend you look into the work of D. Russell Humphreys, Robert V. Gentry W. Scott Morrow. That last person wrote a forward for Gentry's monograph on Pleochroic Halos in which he decried the bigotry of the established scientific community. Though admitting to be an agnostic, he takes his fellow scientists to task for the indifference and obstacles they put in Gentry's way in his pursuit of his unconventional doctorate (creation evidence in pleochroic radiohalos).

Please don't naively assume the white coats are all singing from the same page.

Some sources for you to investigate are:
Starlight and Time - D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.
Good News from Neptune: The Voyager 2 magnetic measurements - a paper also by Humphreys
Creation's Tiny Mystery - "Robert V. Gentry

I don't know why I do this (suggest avenues of investigation). It is easier to spout off the accustomed line ("all scientists agree") than to actually investigate. "All scientists agreed" also that bloodletting would make you a healthier patient.

B. wrote:

BTW, "an ion stream a million light years long" *is* a comment on the distance from one end of the stream to the other.

Looking at God's creation with the tools available does not constitute a doubt that God created it. And the tools result in views that are consistant with the old picture, but with higher, finer focus.

Which tools are you valuing more? According to 2nd Timothy 3:16 the bible is the Tool par excellance. Do you agree or not? If you do, then we can discuss from that basis. If you don't, then at least one of us is wasting his/her time on an e-mail group that is named after that assumption (BereanGroup).

When God's Tool says 6 days - by direct statement (Gen. 1, Exodus 20:9 - 11) and -some- scientists say 15 - 20 billion years, which tool do you think needs to be recalibrated?

B. wrote:

Similar to Pasteur's discovery of contagious agents, progressing to the visualization of bacteria and parasites with LeeVanHoek's lenses and then on to even better visualization with electron microscopy.

On the other hand, to cast doubt on the faith and motives of those who profess to serve God because they come to different conclusions than you do is dangerous.

Love is trusting.

It is not possible for me to defend the biblical view in this matter without casting doubt on the faith of those who disagree. I leave the motives untouched, that is not for me to worry about. But if a person does not believe, have faith in, God's clear statements, then yes, that person's faith is of course in doubt. Not necessarily in an absolute sense, as if to say that everyone who doesn't believe in YEC (Young Earth Creationism) is unsaved, but just that they have as yet to listen to their Lord's instructions on this important matter. Of course there are also those who are unsaved, who only assume a veneer of faith for the sake of custom or comfort but who get all their wisdom from the spirit of this age.

Not to cast doubt in these matters - not to examine these things critically, not to Bereanize them - is where the real danger lies.

"Love is trusting"? Trusting is believing. We are to "love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength." By God's grace I am trying to do that.

This is a continuation of my response to Pastor John Morgan's Old Earth article:

He had written:
How and when did the craters on the Moon get there? Have you ever counted the craters on the Moon and asked "When in the Genesis 1 account did the craters form on the Moon?" Over what period of time did they form? Did God just create the Moon instantaneously in its present state so that it appears to have had thousands of meteor impacts? If so, he falsified not only the craters themselves but also radioactive elements which show that more impacts occurred long, long ago and only a few have occurred recently.

How about the craters on the Earth? It is not mere speculation that a massive impact occurred - an impact so massive that it would have filled the atmosphere with dust and changed the climate, killing most life. I expect you to question the dating - 65 million years ago, but do you reject the fact that the crater exists? When, in your chronology, did the impact occur? Before Adam was created or after? What are the implications of each answer? Would you claim that God needed to have such a crater for his miracle of creation to be mature?

What about the craters? If they appear old, perhaps it is the assumption that makes it so. What taught us to think that way about what we see on the face of the moon? It reminds me of the man whose kids, in a prank, smeared Camembert cheese on his mustache when he slept. Upon awaking he said it smelled like cheese in the room. Walking outside, he said, "Why, the whole world smells like cheese!". Many of us do the same thing in -our- assessment of the world, the moon and the universe. We hold our presuppositions so close to us that we cannot be made aware of them. Only until we are led to say, with Paul, "Let God be true and every man a liar", do we begin to have the scales fall from our eyes, and begin to see gracious evidences in the very places where we saw obstinate obstacles.

To this pastor, the craters -seemed- ancient, because he listened too much to those who said they were ancient.

If we were to assume that craters are formed at the current rate, the evidence of the crater-pocked moon would be a real problem for a 6000 year old creation. But the Bible tells us of a great cataclysm - the global flood. When the fountains of the deep broke up, there were most likely huge chunks of rock that were hurled into space, especially scarring Earth's nearest neighbor. The rate and the force of these impacts was much, much greater than that of the few meteors we see in our time.

Dozens of other evidences could be offered.

Each one of the evidences with the cheese attached, because the basic presupposition is not questioned.

Do you know about these things or do you ignore the testimony of Creation? If you know, how can you discount all the evidence? Steve Wilkins brushes it aside by saying that Adam was created full grown. But, if we could examine Adam, wouldn't the details tell us that Adam had not lived his apparent age? Say God created Adam with a belly button, and with dirt under his finger nails and with scratches on his arms and with apple cores on the ground with bite marks that match Adam's teeth and apple in his stomach, then I would say that God had created a false history. This is the case with the universe. If the universe is not billions of years old, then God falsified the evidence.

This is to say that, "If the priests in white coats are wrong (scientists), then God falsified the evidence, because He refused to override their prejudices when they were forming their conclusions." God is not bound to correct the blindness of some scientists who start out with the first principal of "There is no God".

For a pastor, of all people, to say such an irresponsible thing as "If the universe is not billions of years old, then God falsified the evidence" is as astonishing as it is grating for Christians to hear. Whose evidence did he consult when he made that pronouncement - after he put his Bible away from him? He calls God a liar to justify his doubts.

Originaly updated July 17, 2002

Part 3