I'm glad to hear that you see science and the Bible on the same level.
There are many christians that don't believe that. I see a basic problem
with most christians, and that is that they start with the Bible. They
are either raised in a christian home to believe that the Bible is true
or decide to believe that for other reasons. I think, very rarely do
people look at the evidence for the accuracy for the Bible and then
conclude "hey, this is pretty reliable".
I think christians and everybody in general needs to go through their
epistemology. What do we accept as truth in general, not science, not the
Bible, but in general. I mean, you have to accept something else as being
true before you accept sciene or the Bible, right? You have to believe
that your senses are giving you an accurate picture of the outside
world. After that you have to draw certain conclusions and inferences.
Like who and what do I trust and why. We belive that language works.
That it acutally relays information that we can trust. Many christians
don't accept this kind of fundamental idea of truth that comes prior to
the Bible. It's like "No, only the Bible is true". It seems very absurd
to me.
I think if we think through our epistemology philosophically we will come
to the conlcusion that science and experience must be trusted just as
much as the Bible. Maybe even more in circumstances because we have
more reasons to believe them. This is what I think is wrong with many
christians today and lies at the heart of our problem with the
creation/evolution and the Bible/science problem.
In response to what Glen said about the historicity of the Bible. I
didn't mean to say by my comment about the Bible not being a science book
that it didn't contain certain facts in it that we can test. By no
means. What I meant was that the Bible wasn't written to teach us about
science, like maybe a geology or physics book. I was written to convey
to us God's purpose for us and the world and how God has, is and
will work in our lives. So we shouldn't expect equations of physics or
principles of superpostion or cross-cutting in the Bible, it wasn't
written for that. BUT, as you (Glen) said it does contain historical
events that can be verified. I definitely agree with what you said. I
also think that there is a lot of evidence to verify the historical
events in the Bible, especially from archaeology. I haven't studied too
much in depth, and haven't found any major errors, at least about events
in recent times.
Glen, in response to the problems that you see between Genesis and
natural history. I'm not quite sure what you were saying in your first
question. What's wrong with sea creatures, sea mammals and birds being
created on the same day, as long as it was long enough?
As far as your second question is concerned I think I'll quote from Hugh
Ross' book "Creation and Time" (pg.153).
Order of Genesis 1 Events
1. Creation by God's fiat miracle of the entire physical universe
(length, width, height, time, matter, energy, galaxies, stars,
planets, etc.)
Note: Planet Earth is empty of life and unfit for life; Earth's
primordial atmosphere and the solar system's interplanetary
debris prevent the light of the sun, moon, and stars from
reaching the surface of the earth's ocean.
2. Clearing of the interplanetary debris and partial
tranformation of the earth's atmosphere so that light from the
heavenly bodies now penetrates to the surface of the earth's ocean.
3. Formation of water vapor in the trophoshere under conditions
that establish a stable water cycle.
4. Formation of continental land masses together with ocean basins.
5. Production of plants on the continental land masses.
6. Transformation of the atmosphere from a translucent condition
to one that is at least occasionally transparent.
7. Production of swarms of small sea animals.
8. Creation by God's fiat miracles of sea mammals and birds.
9. Creation by God of land mammals capable of interacting with
the future human race.
10. Creation by God's fiat miracle of the human species.
So Hugh Ross sees the changing of the atmosphere and the interplanetary
debris as being gradual. He puts light penetrating to the earth's oceans
before land plants, so that might solve the problem right there. I don't
know. I haven't done much studying on this particular topic. What do
you think Glen?
About the animals. In his book Hugh Ross talks about how people see
problems in Genesis 1 because of their misinterpretation of the hebrew
words for animals. What they meant by birds, sea creatures and land
creatures was different than what we mean by those words today. We have
to look at the meanings of the words to figure out what they're talking
about.
Sorry about my wrong date on when geologists gave up on flood geology. I
had heard that the general geology community gave up on it somewhere
between 1850 and 1990, even though some people like Hutton and Lyell
expressed their distaste for it a long time before that.
I agree that apologetics is a very big field and it's hard to get your
grip on it, like Glen said. I think this goes back to our epistemology.
Who do we trust? Do we trust scientists who are experts in their
fields? We do every day, when we turn on our car, or use our microwave,
or turn on the radio, etc. etc. Most people forget from where we got all
of our technology. That's just a pratical example that we do already
trust scientists. I think if we think through our epistemology we will
find it profitable to trust experts. It's really the only way. We can't
all know everything about all areas of knowledge. We can't be experts in
everything. So we have to trust other people, who are experts. It's
okay. Although I often this conspiracy vibe going around in christian
circles concerning secular scientists, "all those heathens have banded
against us, we can't trust them". What a bunch of baloney!
By the way, how does somebody assert that the universe is old, but not
the solar system? Sounds like a selective choice of data to me.
David