Re: physics of a mesopotamian flood

Bill Hamilton (hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com)
Fri, 30 May 1997 11:12:36 -0400

At 10:17 PM -0500 5/29/97, Glenn Morton wrote:

>What I
>object to is God inspiring a book which says "I created things ex-nihilo"
>when He didn't. This is an UNTRUE and INCOMPLETE account of creation. It
>is the UNTRUE portion that bothers me. Scripture says God is truth. It also
>says He inspired the Bible writers. But God can't be truth when he inspires
>falsehoods.

I'm more than a little puzzled by this. I'm not sure where even to start.
Genesis 1 says that in the beginning He created the heavens and the earth.
And various New Testament passages (Col 1:16,17; John 1:1-3 for example)
make it clear that all things were created by God. Therefore creation ex
nihilo follows pretty straightforwardly (I labor this point because once or
twice I've run into people who claim the Bible doesn't teach that God
created ex nihilo. _I_ don't take that position) So granted God created
everything ex nihilo. If you accept the Big Bang (I do -- at least
provisionally) everything exploded from a singularity 20 billion years ago
or so. If you consider a singularity to be "nothing" then you have science
and Scripture in agreement (however approximate) right there. If you don't
(remember Francis Schaeffer talking about "nothing nothing"?) then the
question is how was the singularity created. That question is admittedly
outside the scope of science as we know it, so again I see no conflict.
Are you alluding to the creation of man? Both science and the Bible teach
that _physically_ man had material precursors. (But the precursors were
created from nothing) The Bible teaches that God made man from the dust of
the earth. Evolutionary theory traces the ancestry of man through early
hominids back to primates. But what is a primate without the Spirit of
God? Dust. So again I see no conflict. But you are saying there is a
conflict and I know you don't believe there is. In fact you've spent quite
a bit of time and effort showing that the flooding of the Mediterranean 5.5
million years ago answers quite a few geological conundrums about the flood
account, and gives us a view of ancient man that says some interesting
things about the question of what man is, if it's correct. What gives?

Bill Hamilton
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William E. Hamilton, Jr, Ph.D. | Staff Research Engineer
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