Evidence for God from Science

One cannot help but to know that who ever wrote Genesis was indeed the creator. An all knowing, all-powerful and all-pervading being. In a literal pinch (with this knowledge) nobody in their right mind could deny that any of it is even a lie. If G-d said He created things in a 6 literal days, you better believe He did!

correct me if I misinterpreted, but does the bloded part indicate that if Genesis was written by all all-knowing Creator God, then you could not deny it, even if it was a lie? I thought God didn't lie? I thought the Bible was written by human hands... I'm pretty sure they were capable of lying, or at least misunderstanding God.

Thats the problem Zoe, there arent any sourses on the internet that I could cite.

Information about Phi is out there, but its simply not enough.

Simply not enough? You mean not enough to support your position? Maybe if you google "Pi" instead?

The evidence should speak for itself... God has no need to decieve us. It is absolutely clear that the Earth is old. I still want to see your list of evidence in favor of Young Earth/Universe (NOT EVIDENCE AGAINST OR ATTACKS ON EVOLUTION). We already know you question evolution. It has to be Earthly evidence from this planet or outside that the Earth is 6000 years old. I'll take anything at this point.

I'm not really into this young vs. old business, but I'll say one thing. IF I were to be making a case for anything younger then 10 thousand years old, it would have to be the earth. The universe is obviously a lot older given its constant expansion rate from the big bang and by looking at the age of the stars (which is in the billions). In this case carbon dating estimates would make as much sense for a young earth as they would for an old earth. But to the observer, the data would be two-fold and very sketchy.

I am working on how I can supply this truth. Unfortunetly I cant make it available on this forum because the [IMG] will not allow me to post Hebrew. When I try and post it, it reads backwards. Hebrew is supposed to read from right to left, but when I try and post it, it reads from left to right.

your evidence is in Hebrew? I'm not talking about the Bible in any language here, I'm talking about physical evidence we can see and touch and experiments on all around us... this does not require translation from Hebrew and it must be all over the place if the world is 6000 years old.

I'm not really into this young vs. old business, but I'll say one thing. IF I were to be making a case for anything younger then 10 thousand years old, it would have to be the earth. The universe is obviously a lot older given its constant expansion rate from the big bang and by looking at the age of the stars (which is in the billions). In this case carbon dating estimates would make as much sense for a young earth as they would for an old earth. But to the observer, the data would be two-fold and very sketchy.

well, YEC's question the big Bang too.

BUT, you don't even need to dive too much into fossils, geology, dating methods and rates of this and that. It is simply common sense that the Earth is older than 6000 years old. There are simply too many lifeforms, too many geologic events, too many distinct periods in Earth's history for it to FIT into that timescale! Not to mention that recorded civilization goes back nearly 5000 years, if not up to 10,000 years. And this is JUST civilized, agrarian human civilization, we have a nomadic history that traces back even further.

BUT, you don't even need to dive too much into fossils, geology, dating methods and rates of this and that. It is simply common sense that the Earth is older than 6000 years old. There are simply too many lifeforms, too many geologic events, too many distinct periods in Earth's history for it to FIT into that timescale! Not to mention that recorded civilization goes back nearly 5000 years, if not up to 10,000 years. And this is JUST civilized, agrarian human civilization, we have a nomadic history that traces back even further.

I definitely agree that the earth is in no way 6 thousand years old, not even 10 thousand or 100 thousand. That can't be "common sense" though, "common sense" also tells us that abstract or symbolic code is the product of (intelligent) agency. Although the evidence clearly points to an old earth now, it may point to a much younger earth in the future. Personally, I really don't care either way, but all there is needed in science is one hard discovery to turn the tables around, even if multiple discoveries currently point to some dominant theory.

Just a few thoughts regarding the posts I have read here. I came across this, reading my bible the other day: Revelation 16:18 NKJV "And there were noises and thunderings and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such a mighty and great earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth."

From this verse we could surmise that there were massive destructive earth quakes before man. If God created the earth in 6 literal days, then what would the be the use for massive destructive earth quakes during the first 5 days? This is quite contradictary to creation imo. To me this ties up perfectly with OEC, coz I can imagine there were massive earth quakes while the earth was forming. Or am I wrong here?

And another thing.

Genesis 2:16-17 NKJV "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat;17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.""

Now one of two things is possible here. Either God was lying, which I don't think so. Or a "day" is longer than 24 hours.And we are still in the 7th day. And don't tell me that from that day he will be able to die because that is not what is written there. If I tell you if you eat something you are going to die, you are definitely not going to think that I probably meant later on. YEC are quick to say the days in Genisis are literal but when you point to this verse then that "day" isn't 24 hours or something else is meant. Or am I wrong here as well?

Its remarkable however, that the sequential logic in the quote "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" is scientifically valid. A beginning, a universe and then the earth. If it was the earth before the heavens or perhaps even humans before the earth then I would start to question its validity. Perhaps this same sequential process was used to create us through evolution, a bottom up approach to design. However, this sort of design would require top-down causation since all the result-end information specific structural code would have to be formed if you are to discount an intervening God thereafter. Otherwise your back to the unpredictable nature of Darwinian Evolution which God could never have planned for, due to the fact that plans of that sort by someone of that sort can never be unpredictable. Unless ofcourse you think God liked Darwin alot.

For a star the size of our sun, nuclear fusion would not begin for the first million years after it begins to shine. The shining would be the result of continued gravitational collapse. This is what distinguishes a real star (nuclear fusion in the core) from a protostar. The gravitational collapse should be observable.

Instead, we have not measured any Helmholtz collapse. By 1996 we had measured half of the neutrinos expected from nuclear fusion on the stellar core. Half, not some less significant fraction. That was a puzzle, though one likely explanation offered at the time was the two state model for neutrinos. We were only able to detect one state. As another person mentioned, neutrinos oscillate between states. We built a detector receptive to the other state, and discovered the missing half. The sun is now known to produce all the neutrinos expected from nuclear fusion, and nuclear fusion would occur in a star the size of our sun only after some 500 thousand to 1 million years of a protostellar existence.

Homogeneity would be expected in a young star, but solar observations over the past two decades indicate our sun is also anything but. There are very distinct gradients between the core and surface, which we detected with the SOHO spacecraft (coincidentally launched in 1996).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

Scroll down to the part about the sun's core to find out more about the gradients.

"Living systems only have the appearance of being evolved by Darwinian mechanisms"

Why do you suppose that is?

I keep thinking that if I were God, I might well have created the universe through the big bang process and subsequent gradual evolution of life, just as it appears.

On the other hand, if I wanted people to believe the world was only 6000 years old, I would have created the species distinct and separate, without race circles or genetic evidence of common ancestry. I would NOT have created simians, or any of the fossil hominids. The closest relatives to man would have been the lemurs. That way, there would be little mistaking the fact I wanted man to realize he was special, and not part of any evolutionary process. No way would I have created fossils of whales with legs, or anything remotely like them. I would not have created the fossils of ancient permian amphibians which bear such uncanny resemblance to jawed rhipidistian lungfish of the same era. Nope. I would also not have bothered creating other galaxies. I MIGHT have proceeded with the creation of all the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, but these would only become visible as the light from their existence crossed the creation world line boundary. In other words--nothing more than six thousand light years out would be visible, and new stars would occasionally begin to shine in the night sky as as they came within the ever expanding creation time line sphere.

That would be such clear, simple, compelling evidence. It is a wonder to me that God never thought of it. Obviously God does not intend us to believe the world is merely 6000 years old. Otherwise, the all the best evidence would not point against that.

Either that, or Satan had far to big a hand in the creation of our universe. Do YEC christians believe Satan is the real Creator?

Anita wrote:When we understand the scientific evidence we will find that it agrees with what the Bible teaches. The evidence is certainly consistent with a young earth.

Anita, I think you are right that the scientific evidence agrees with what the Bible teaches. However, I think you are mistaken about what the Bible teaches. The evidence is anything but consistent with a young earth.

The topic under discussion here concerned the interstellar clouds of hydrogen in Orion, the Orion Nebula, I believe. That stellar nursery is only a few thousand light years away (about 1500). The light from any processes occurring there now has had plenty of time to reach us. On the other hand, we know that small stars must shine as protosuns through Helmholtz contraction (gravitational collapse) roughly a million years before before their internal temperatures and pressures become high enough for nuclear fusion. Astrophysicists estimate our own beloved sun is about half way through its roughly nine billion year life cycle on the main sequence, before it collapses to a white dwarf. I learned recently that in only a billion years (instead of 4.5 billion) it should become hot enough to boil away earth's oceans and fry life. Our planet lies towards the inside of the present habitable zone around our sun, despite the cold polar seasons.

But let's look a bit further afield, just because now we can. In 1987 astronomers beheld the light of a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is just a bit outside our own Milky Way. It is probably not actually part of our local group, as the velocity of it and the Small Magellanic Cloud are high enough to send them off on their way. Our galaxy is gravitationally bound to the much larger and more impressive Andromeda Galaxy. We are currently hurtling towards each other, and will collide in another few billion years. This won't be our first collision either, as is evidenced by the streamers of stars connecting our galaxies. Of course, our galaxies might have just been created to appear as though they had once passed through each other billions of years ago, long before our own sun was born.

But what I really want to talk about is Sanduleak -69 207, which was the topic sentence of my previous paragraph. This was a bloated star in the LMC, surrounded by a ring of material about 6 light months out from some earlier supernova event. Both star and ring are circled by a pair of rings even further out. The whole effect is quite beautiful, and you can find plenty of really neat photos of SN1987A in Google images if you care to look.

The key fact about this big, bloated star was that in went kablooie. The light of that event reached us in 1987. Now, before the star blew apart, the distance to the LMC had been estimated between 50,000 and 200,000 light years. That is a pretty big variation, but by the early 1980s our equipment and improved so that most astronomers thought the distance was pretty close to 175,000 light years. Note--the LMC is fairly near by, Andromeda is over 2 million light years away, and we can count close to 100 billion galaxies scattered from us out about ten billion light years in any direction.

Well, what of SN1987A? SuperNova 1987a, A indicating the first one detected that year. I think astronomers quit using letters to designate supernovas because in the past few years the counts have shot up into the hundreds with improvements in our technology. Because of the ring, we could measure the distance to this star using simple trigonometry. We have the arc seconds between the star and ring. All we need more is the time for the light from the supernova event to strike the ring at right angles to us. This problem has been given to college astronomy students all over america. The star is right about 172,000 light years away. The margin of error is within the precision of our instrumentation--just a few percent.

Neutrinos began streaming into our underground detectors just a little bit before the supernova itself became visible. Since one could insist neutrinos are a form of light, one might argue that the speed of light could still have decreased over time, just in such a way that the light of the neutrinos still preceded it by the expected amount by the time it reached us. That argument is really far fetched, and then totally demolished by the prosaic matter from the star itself striking the inner ring, right on schedule at the velocity calculated. The speed of light, it seems, is fairly constant. It has not varied by more than a few millionths of a percent (within our ability to measure) over the past ten billion years.

If God created the universe 6000 years ago, then God created streams of neutrinos and light consistent with the explosion of a star in the direction of the LMC but only 6000 light years from earth. THAT smacks of deception. Or God could have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, as the COBE and WMAP observatories clearly indicate, and just created our little earth 6000 years ago, burying terratons of evidence within it of a much older existence.

I'm not comfortable with either of those conjectures. To me it seems far simpler to realize that the truth of the Holy Scriptures does not in reality address the scientific origin of the earth and universe beyond.

Young sun. Young son. The son of God, the sun of God. Sun day, the day of the sun. The day of the Son?

Monday the day of the moon.
Thuesday the day of Mars.
Wednesday the day of Mercury.
Thursday the day of Jupiter.
Friday the day of Venus.
Saturday the day of Saturn.

Interresting topic on the question of the age of the sun. But what about the age of the Universe ? Is our universe older than another one or ones?

I have met a man about thirty years ago who claimed that there is more than one universe out there... And some scientists are today claiming it or more like theorysing about it.

Just for the sake.

Zebulon

Zebulon, you're reading things into the words "son" and "sun" that are not there. Those words are only similar in English and some Germanic languages, none of which were spoken in the Biblical lands two thousand years ago.

Swamper wrote:Zebulon, you're reading things into the words "son" and "sun" that are not there. Those words are only similar in English and some Germanic languages, none of which were spoken in the Biblical lands two thousand years ago.

You are right Swamper. The two words are pronounced the same way while written and meaning differently. I just brought the sun/son situation to open a discussion on the fact that since, like you said about languages, none of which were spoken in the Biblical lands two thousand years ago, means that the bibles today are translated from a lot less quantity of words and thus meanings than the quantity of words and meanings that we have today. And, may I say, that our brain works better and probably differently than 2000 years ago.

Ok, Zebulon, breathe, breathe by the nose (a french expression?). Evidence for a Young Sun or Evidence for a Young Son is just a question of relativity of time.
At this moment, right now nothing exists.
Present does not exist.

As I am writing the lines that you are reading I am entering in the future or, may I say, I am sliding into it. And now you are looking at my entering the future that became the past. There is no present. As you may know, right at this moment the sun does not exist. If you go outside and have a look at the sun you are looking at the past of the sun. Relatively speaking the sun existed minous/plus 8 minutes ago.

My question now could be is God present?

Nevertheless, if your wife comes out of the shower naked with the blink in her eye that she wants you, you are looking at her at a micro part of a second of her in the past depending how far she is off you. But gosh I am sure you will be more than present

Regards

Zebulon

Zebulon wrote:

Swamper wrote:Zebulon, you're reading things into the words "son" and "sun" that are not there. Those words are only similar in English and some Germanic languages, none of which were spoken in the Biblical lands two thousand years ago.

You are right Swamper. The two words are pronounced the same way while written and meaning differently. I just brought the sun/son situation to open a discussion on the fact that since, like you said about languages, none of which were spoken in the Biblical lands two thousand years ago, means that the bibles today are translated from a lot less quantity of words and thus meanings than the quantity of words and meanings that we have today. And, may I say, that our brain works better and probably differently than 2000 years ago.

Ok, Zebulon, breathe, breathe by the nose (a french expression?). Evidence for a Young Sun or Evidence for a Young Son is just a question of relativity of time.
At this moment, right now nothing exists.
Present does not exist.

As I am writing the lines that you are reading I am entering in the future or, may I say, I am sliding into it. And now you are looking at my entering the future that became the past. There is no present. As you may know, right at this moment the sun does not exist. If you go outside and have a look at the sun you are looking at the past of the sun. Relatively speaking the sun existed minous/plus 8 minutes ago.

My question now could be is God present?

Nevertheless, if your wife comes out of the shower naked with the blink in her eye that she wants you, you are looking at her at a micro part of a second of her in the past depending how far she is off you. But gosh I am sure you will be more than present

Regards

Zebulon

Haha, yes, I get what you mean.