>Then why do you cite interpreters, like Arthur Custance, when it suits
your
>purpose? At least you ought to be consistent. Or do you just rely on the
>hermeneutics of others when you like the conclusions?
And Glenn responded:
<<Oh, Jim, that wasn't a discussion of interpretation or what type of
literature we are looking at. It was a count of how many times a word is
chosen to translate 'eretz'. Write or wrongly, that is an objective
measure.>>
Oh, I see. So when you go on to quote him thus:
"That is to say, the choice of Earth or Land as a translation of the
original in any particular instance is a matter of context: and on the
whole, if we exclude the account of the Flood, usage elsewhere shows that
the context favours the word Land rather than Earth."
I suppose that's not hermeneutics. I should have guessed, since he was
talking about "context," that he wasn't doing any interpreting. How silly
of me. How could I have thought you were including an interpretation
because it seemed to favor your view? How could I have been so dim? Three
years of law school? Two years at Chippendale's? (You guess which one's the
fib).
You can't have it both ways. If you want to throw out hermeneutics, throw
it out. But give us somethig to replace it. Tell us how to approach
Scripture so it makes sense. Or maybe it's not supposed to make sense. Are
you a deconstructionist now?
>No, God doesn't make the lenses. We do. That's called presuppositionalism.
>And if we make the wrong lenses, we see the wrong things.
<<But as I said, if God had thoroughly mixed the fossils up we would have
no
excuse for applying the wrong lens. Why do you think God left that as an
option? Is it because God didn't do what you WANT him to have done?>>
I love the way evolutionists hold God to a human standard. Why wasn't he a
better engineer? Why didn't he mix the fossils up forus? Might not the
message be, not deception, but you've got the wrong specs, dude?
>But here's my question. Why are you assuming these tracks had to be left
>just before the flood?
<<I didn't say that. These tracks HAD to be made DURING the flood.>>
How much of this is dependent on a young earth? Are you saying that young
earth and global flood must always go together?
>Isn't Baumgardner
>suggesting thermal runaway?
<<runaway subduction. His model by the 6 author's own admission would
create
too much heat and would fry the earth.>>
Hmm. What he actually says is:
<<A. Above that boundary there is abundant evidence that the sedimentary
layers were deposited rapidly by processes that were global in lateral
extent-a regime dramatically different from anything we can observe on the
Earth today. The majority of the sedimentary record since that point is the
product of global catastrophism. My work in particular has focused on what
conceivable mechanism could result in such an event. I believe I have
identified it, or at least a likely candidate for a mechanism.
Q. And what is that?
A. The name other people have applied to this process is thermal runaway.
Tectonic plates of the Earth's surface can slide down into the hot mantle
that comprises about the outer 2,000 miles of the Earth. What I'm finding
is that this runaway process involving the tectonic plates can indeed occur
and cause a massive catastrophe at the Earth's surface. One exciting
discovery from the Magellan mission to Venus in the early 1990s was that
Venus had been entirely resurfaced in the relatively recent past. The high
resolution images showed the surface of Venus had been catastrophically
flooded with lava, presumably as a result of some process interior to the
planet. All the ancient craters had been obliterated by this lava. The
images show hardly any change of a geological nature has occurred on Venus
since this catastrophe. So within our own solar system we now have at least
one indisputable example of global tectonic catastrophe. This was exciting
to me because for years I had been investigating a similar possibility for
the Earth. I firmly believe the idea of a global tectonic catastrophe on
the Earth is not a far-fetched idea, but close to being established as
scientific fact. And, of course, this supports what the Scripture has said
all along about the past history of the Earth.>>
It doesn't sound to me like he thinks it fried the earth. It sounds to me
like he thinks this is how the Earth got to look the way it does.
<<Question: Why do invertebrate tracks continue throughout the entire
column,
Amphibians first appear in the Mississippian (in the western US, Devonian
in
Europe) and mammals appear last.>>
This sounds like a good question for a uniformitarian to ask a YEC, with
both operating under naturalistic assumptions. And I don't know what an
answer would be. But I guess the question I would pose is this: Let's
assume the flood waters abated miraculously, and that God did not arrange
the fossils in any way. Just took the water and dried the earth in a
fashion unlike anything we observe. (I would also allow for more time than
a classic YEC). Question: would it be impossible for the record to look
like it does?
Jim