Re: physics of a mesopotamian flood

Glenn Morton (grmorton@psyberlink.net)
Fri, 30 May 1997 20:11:43 -0500

At 11:12 AM 5/30/97 -0400, Bill Hamilton wrote:
>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.

You have a good reason to be confused. I mis-wrote (I can't say mis-spoke)
here. I was thinking of the young-earth creationist view of the creation of
all animals ex nihilo when I wrote the above. I should not have grabbed that
mental picture because it was not exactly what we were talking about. My
apologies.
If animals evolved then they were not created ex nihilo. Sorry about the
confustion.

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?

What gives? Hoof in mouth disease! :-)

My apologies to everyone for my stupidity in my reply to Bill.

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm