Both Young Earth and Deep Age skew their claims by disregarding ancient records that have been validated by the scientific method, and ignoring multiple scientific advances in understanding our world.
For example:
Using the latest high-resolution flood hazard and population maps…we estimate that 1.47 billion people globally are directly exposed to the risk of intense flooding…
Flood risks are global…constantly evolving. There is evidence that the process of coastal urbanization is accelerating the increase of flood risk.
This study was supported by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR).
Despite the latest geological evidence for Noah’s flood as the last of a series of world-wide catastrophes as listed in Genesis chapter 1 and fleshed out in Job 38, this is categorized as apostasy by fundamentalist dispensationalists for the purely dogmatic reason that accepting it opens the door to Evolution.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Scopes Trial…was that old-earth creationism was not consistent with an approach to the Bible as the divinely inspired Word of God. The outcome was two dichotomous options, Darwinian evolution and young-earth creationism…as the only theologically viable approach to the Bible…the old-earth model received a mortal wound at the Scopes Trial. The severity of the wound would be revealed nearly a half-century later…
in 1967, Lynn White wrote a paper entitled “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” in which he laid much of the blame for an impending environmental catastrophe at the feet of Christians, due to dominionist views that led to overconsumption of natural resources…
For Jerry Falwell—the dispensationalist pastor who organized the Religious Right’s flagship organization, the Moral Majority, in 1979—legislation that attempted to reduce emissions of fossil fuels ran afoul on two grounds…For Falwell, free-market capitalism, without restrictions such as on the burning of fossil fuels, was Cold- War America’s front-line defense against communism and best assurance of a high value of human life.
But what about the Bible’s clear mandate on righteous behavior? What about the Third World countries whose natural resources are being exploited to keep American consumers gratified with low prices?
On another level, acknowledgment of climate change…went against the wisdom of YEC and creation science; instead, these concerns fell back on…mainstream science, which was not based on the Bible….For Falwell and like-minded fundamentalists and evangelicals in the Religious Right, the push for environmentalism took Christians away from worshiping the Creator and instead emphasized created things.
Really? This reveals the perverted interpretation of “have dominion” and ignores the clear statement of scripture:
“O Lord God Almighty…thy wrath is come…that thou shouldest…destroy them which destroy the earth...And the temple of God was opened in heaven…and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.” (Revelation 11:17-19)
During the 1980s heyday of the Religious Right…Reagan’s administration, particularly under Secretary of the Interior James Watt, not only decreased the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency but also eliminated many environmental laws from the past two decades…also saw markedly increased drilling and burning of fossil fuels…would lay an important foundation for the next generation of YEC apologists…
acknowledgment of climate change challenges a literal interpretation of Genesis and, by extension, the authority of the entire Bible.
If one is unable to believe that God means what He says—that He created the earth in six literal, 24-h days—then that person is unable to uphold the divine authority of the entire Bible…if Christians can call the Genesis account into question, then they can also delegitimize the gospel record of the life of Christ and any other part of the Bible…
One might note with a sense of irony that, in this view as with the early incursions of Darwinism into American Protestantism, science—creation science—actually becomes the arbiter of the Bible…
Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, has long been leading a movement of evangelicals who are calling for climate justice as part of fulfilling the biblical mandate to be stewards of creation. He quotes Isaiah 24:5-6 to show the significance of creation care for Christian faith…
“The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant [to have dominion]. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt” (NRSV).
This passage goes on to prophecy the same reaction by God against the first organized rebellion detailed in Genesis 1:
“From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous. BUT! I said…woe [NOT glory!] unto me! the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously; yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously.
Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth…for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake. The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and…it shall fall, and not rise again…when the LORD of hosts shall reign in mount Zion” (Isaiah 24:16-23)
The statement that this last time the earth shall not rise again supports the understanding that in previous iterations of this situation the earth did recover its footing.
What is the difference between evangelicals who deny anthro-pogenic [human generated] climate change and those who advocate for climate justice as part of the pro-life evangelical social conscience?…whether or not sustaining biblical authority requires [an English language] literalist [24 hour days of creation], young-earth approach to Genesis…
For many, biblical authority means biblical literalism…the words of the text can be universally understood outside of their original cultural [and language] context…
What does undermine the Bible’s authority is when something other than the Bible becomes a normative [establishing the standard] counterpart to the Bible; hence, the central doctrine of the Reformation was sola scriptura, not biblical literalism.
Sola scriptura, meaning by scripture alone, is a Christian theological doctrine held by some Protestant Christian denominations, in particular the Lutheran and Reformed traditions of Protestantism, that posits the Bible as the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice…
In this vein of sola scriptura, even if creation science is scientifically sound, it is theologically unsound because…the authority of the Bible rests on the reliability of creation science. [Ken Ham’s] Creation Museum visibly displays why creation science is an essential component of biblical authority and why biblical authority collapses apart from the teachings of creation science…creation science has effectively become the norm [standard] that norms [legitimizes] the Bible. This view is theologically incompatible with sola scriptura…
YEC apologists…posit that a literal reading of Genesis is necessary if the gospel accounts of the life of Christ are to be considered reliable. Yet this approach is the reverse of the doctrine of solus Christus, which teaches that the integrity of the Genesis account—along with the rest of the Bible—hinges on Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God. Whether or not creation science is scientifically sound…reliance on the creation account as a whole-Bible hermeneutic is theologically unsound because it places the Genesis narrative, rather than the gospel, at the center of divine revelation…
As such, evangelicals who conceptualize the Bible’s divine authority in terms of sola scriptura rather than literalism [of 24 h days of creation]…do not need [Ken Ham’s] creation science in order to believe that the Bible is true, and they can recognize that the Bible does not necessarily disagree with much (though certainly not all) of modern science. Rather, the Bible stands on its own merit, and the fact that burning fossil fuels is causing widespread damage does not undermine biblical authority…faith in the Bible as the inspired Word of God and the centrality of Christ in divine revelation are precisely what motivate the call to end our dependence on fossil fuels.
This hermeneutic of sola scripture…places a high value on human life…our dependence on oil has led to wars in oil-rich countries such as Iraq; those wars have decimated local cultures and severely impoverished the people. These challenges in oil-rich countries are compounded by climate change, which is affecting the world’s poorest people at a much more accelerated rate than those in affluent countries that consume the most oil….
Climate justice begins with placing…the centrality of Christ back at the center of the evangelical social conscience…
Hear Hear!
Climate change and the threat to civilization
public figures, including Sir David Attenborough…warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to “the collapse of our civilizations” (2). In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable” (3)…
We define civilization collapse as the loss of societal capacity to maintain essential governance functions, especially maintaining security, the rule of law, and the provision of basic necessities such as food and water. Civilization collapses in this sense could be associated with civil strife, violence, and widespread scarcity, and thus have extremely adverse effects on human welfare. Such collapses can be wider or narrower in scope, so we consider three representative scenarios.
In the first, climate change causes collapse in specific, vulnerable locations while civilization elsewhere is largely able to adapt to climate impacts. Call this local collapse. The Syrian civil war has been suggested as an example of climate collapse on a local scale. Model simulations indicate that the kind of drought implicated in the war was more than twice as likely to happen given anthropogenic climate change (6). This example illustrates that climate collapse need not be determined by environmental factors alone: other causes, such as pre-existing political conflict and incompetent government, may be crucial. The example also illustrates the dire consequences for human welfare that collapse may have and that local collapses can contribute to political instability in non-collapsed places, as illustrated by rising right-wing populism in Europe in response to the influx of Syrian refugees.
In our second scenario, urban- and sometimes even national-level collapses are widespread, but some large urban centers and national governments still exist. These existing centers experience negative climate impacts such as persistent water and food scarcity. In his book discussing the ethics and politics of a potential post-apocalyptic world, philosopher Tim Mulgan refers to this type of scenario as the broken world (7); we adopt his label here. The broken world differs from local collapse in its more widespread scope and in the worldwide impaired functioning of non-collapsed places. Concerns that climate change could render “large areas of the Earth uninhabitable” suggest an outcome at least as bad as the broken world.
In our third scenario, which we label global collapse, all large urban areas across the globe are virtually abandoned, functioning nation states no longer exist, and the world’s population undergoes a significant decline. This catastrophic situation is perhaps what the phrase “civilization collapse” evokes for most people. However, it is helpful to see global collapse as an extension of the broken world, wherein the remaining non-collapsed states and urban centers, which have by then become highly vulnerable, are pushed over the brink by further climate impacts. Climate collapse, then, might not be an abrupt event but rather an extended process that starts small and plays out over the course of a century or more…
Several mechanisms that might cause global collapse or a broken world have been discussed. We group these into three types: direct impacts, socio-climate feedbacks, and exogenous shock vulnerability.
Direct impact mechanisms hypothesize that severe and compounding climate impacts—rising sea levels, drought, flooding, extreme heat, and so forth—could undermine agriculture, water availability, and other essential bases of civilization (8, 9). These mechanisms often involve climate feedbacks or tipping points in which, for instance, a global temperature increase of 2°C triggers irreversible rapid collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, releases of methane from permafrost or forest diebacks (10)…
socio-climate feedback mechanisms propose that adverse climate change impacts, especially on food production, may cause political conflict and dysfunction that undermines capacity for adaptation while leading to actions, such as bans on food exports or warfare, that spread destabilization and hasten collapse (11)…
exogenous shock vulnerability mechanisms suggest that climate change might weaken adaptive capacities through processes described in the first two mechanism types, thereby leaving global society vulnerable to collapse triggered by other types of shocks, such as wars or pandemics (12).
Historical and archeological research suggests that past societal collapses have rarely been the result of direct climate perturbations but instead were more commonly attributable to a combination of stressors (13, 14). However, this does not mean that the risk of climate collapse is overstated. To the contrary, it suggests that…risk to civilization is not from direct climate impacts alone but rather those impacts occurring together with dysfunctional social feedbacks and other destabilizing factors.
What both Evolutionist and fundamentalist Christian perspectives miss is how the Bible’s prediction of the end of Western Civilization outlined in Revelation chapter 6 lines up exactly with Climate Change’s exogenous shock mechanisms.
Could be worth investigating…
Moving on to sociological research.
Qualitative data – eliciting in-depth attitudes demonstrating that Noah’s flood wasn’t the first, but rather the last, flood – is found in the extravagant reassurances God gives over and over again in nine verses (Genesis 9:9-17). Put some life into the written word! Feel how this is a parent telling his children to trust him, “I promise I won’t let you die!” under dire circumstances.
Can you think of any other place in the Bible where God goes to this extent making promises over and over in the same passage? Well, yes: John 13:31 – 17:26, summarized as “And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again…”
Back to Noah, where:
“God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying,
- neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood;
- neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
- the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
- And the bow shall be in the cloud…This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.” (Genesis 9)
What is not recorded is that God is speaking to, and over, the panicked babbling, sobbing and screaming eight people with severe Acute Traumatic Stress Disorder as they freeze at the door of the ark, shocked at the view of a devastated and utterly alien world, terrified of experiencing first-hand the raging storms, lightening crashes, tsunami waves, the explosions from volcanos of “the great deep” or asteroids breaking through the “windows of heaven” they somehow survived in the art, but by now their will to live is broken, they are resigned to death and can’t endure the awful conditions of the ark any longer.
Science describes the Ark occupants’ terrifying experience.
While we cannot be absolutely certain of the physical cause of Noah’s flood, the bombardment of asteroids on the earth, as explained by the RATE group, seems to be very high on the list of possibilities. Since there is evidence on the earth of at least 110 impact craters, those that crashed into the sea would have the following effects, but for a more detailed description, see here.
- Giant tsunamis would swamp the land area of the world
- Vast quantities of water would jet up into the lower atmosphere, to fall back on the land as rain
- The earth’s crust would be broken up into the tectonic plates we see today
- Vast amounts of molten magma would flow up into the sea through the fractured sea bed, turning millions or billions of gallons of sea water into steam, which would rise up into the lower atmosphere and then fall back to earth as rain
- A run-away process of subduction (see next paragraph) would be initiated, causing a rapid movement of the tectonic plates and dividing the single land mass into the separated islands we see today
…as the ocean floor (in the areas of the ocean trenches) sinks into the mantle, it drags the rest of the ocean floor with it, in a conveyor-belt-like fashion. The sinking slabs of cold ocean floor produce stress in the surrounding hot mantle rock. These stresses, in turn, cause the rock to become hotter and more deformable, allowing ocean slabs to sink even faster. The ultimate result is a runaway process that causes the entire pre-Flood ocean floor to sink to the bottom of the mantle in a matter of a few weeks…
What do you know – this is the same time frame given in the Bible.
And the flood was forty days / 3 weeks upon the earth; and the waters increased, and…prevailed / stayed put, and were increased…exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” (Genesis 7:17-20)
Interestingly, God instructed Noah to build the ark 30 cubits high. Irregardless of the measure of a “cubit”, the fact of the ark being designed in advance of the flood at a height twice the depth of the water guaranteed its ability to float.
As workmen construct a ship, designers must take into account its draught,which is the measurement of how far into the water the ship will sink when it is fully loaded. Were you to confer with shipbuilding guides, you would discover that the draught for large barge-type vessels generally is approximately one-half of their height. Since the ark was 30 cubits high, it…therefore would need 15 cubits of water above the highest mountains in order for its bottom not to scrape against those mountaintops. Interestingly, God not only designed the perfect vessel for the trip, but also sent the correct amount of water to prevent that vessel from smashing into the top of a submerged mountain peak.
When the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, He did not include information “just to take up space.” Each verse in the Bible is important for one reason or another. Let us all work hard to discover those reasons.
One reason the eight survivors of the End Of The World could believe God’s promise that they would never again have to face the near death experience of a Flood again is that he had been faithful to his word already, both in sending the Flood and in protecting them through it in the Ark.
The same applies to the hearers of God’s word today. We can compare what he documented in the Bible to the evidence seen and experienced in the world around us
As the slabs sink (at rates of feet-per-second) down to the mantle/core boundary, enormous amounts of energy are released.” (Quote from here)
- Only a rapid movement of the tectonic plates could generate enough energy to uplift the huge [in contrast to the gently rolling] mountains of the earth to their present height – today’s slow movement simply would not have the power to do this.
We can rationally, logically, honestly and scientifically deduce from the biblical account that the Rocky Mountains were uplifted during Noah’s flood and the Appalachian Mountains were formed at creation and covered during Noah’s Flood.
And that validates the biblical account of flooding during creation.
“In the beginning God created
- the heaven
- and the earth.
And the earth was [came to be] without form…[under] the deep [waters]…
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the [singular] dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the [singular] dry land Earth;” (Genesis 1:9-10)
This, too, is validated by geological science.
Pangea, also spelled Pangaea, in early geologic time, a supercontinent that incorporated almost all the landmasses on Earth…surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa…began to break apart about___years ago…forming the modern continents and the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Pangea’s existence was first proposed in 1912 by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener as a part of his theory of continental drift.
- The huge asteroid impacts on the earth’s surface (any one of which would have had the force of 100,000 hydrogen bombs) would explain the sudden switches of the earth’s magnetic polarity seen in the cooled magma on the sea bed.
- The cataclysmic impacts would trigger giant super-volcanoes and earthquakes over the following decades, which in turn would send vast amounts of smoke, ash, soot, etc. into the atmosphere, massively reducing the sun’s rays.
- The hot magma pouring into the ocean would heat it up, while at the same time the reduced sun’s rays on the land would cool that down: the result of warm sea against cold land is snow – and lots of it! This would produce the ice age, lasting several hundred years. It has been calculated that 2,300 feet of ice could accumulate in 500 years by this process.
So if the scientific calculations are that an extinction event would produce 2,300 feet of ice accumulation in 500 years and last several hundred years, why do scientists attribute millions of years to ice ages?
Pleistocene epoch: The last ice age
By published
The Pleistocene featured…the arrival of modern humans.
Oh, right. The Evolutionists’ dogma overrides science.
this epoch began about 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, according to the International Commission on Stratigraphy(opens in new tab).
The Pleistocene was preceded by the Pliocene epoch and followed by the Holocene epoch, which we still live in today, and is part of a larger time period called the Quaternary period (2.6 million years ago to present).
Refer back to the End Of The World scenarios facing humanity today as a direct result of “modern” human misbehavior. It’s scientifically untenable to propose that humans have managed to avert triggering an End Of The World for millions of years.
Kingdom Come 