Archive for the 'The Science' Category

Scientific Dating of Sodom and Gomorrah Supports Flood Date

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

According to an article about Marie-Agnès Courty, she has found that soil samples mapping to 2200 BC correspond very well to when the Earth apparently experienced cometary debris.  According to the article, the affects would have been quite similar to the fire from Heaven that Biblically destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.  If the flood really did take place 2800 BC, then this time-frame could make a lot of sense.  It dates Abraham to around 2200 BC. 

Now many Christians have used the genealogies within scripture to derive a date for Abraham of around 2000 BC, but such dating is inexact, and does not account for potentially skipped generations.  Still, getting within 200 years seems pretty good to me.

What is cool about this is that it …

Dating the Flood… when Science Meets History

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

In Dating the Flood… May 10, 2807 B.C.?, I reported on possible scientific evidence for Noah’s flood.  Whatever else is true, it would seem that a meteor struck the Indian Ocean around 2800 BC, leaving what is known as the Burckle Crater.  But here’s the thing.  The size of the resulting tsunamis would have caused massive flooding up and down the entire Indian Gulf, including Africa, India, and the Middle East.  This would explain why so many traditions have stories of a flood.  Then, as Noah’s descendants met up with other populations throughout the world, it would seem the stories morphed to the point where some they had a suprising number of similarities, going beyond just the idea of a flood.  This would also …

Dating the Flood… May 10, 2807 B.C.?

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

One powerful piece of evidence that Christians who believe in an Old Earth would love to add their arsenal would be if contemporary science could tell us when the flood occurred, and if it could date the flood to around the time Young Earth Christians generally think.  Well, you can’t get more maintstream than the New York times, and they published an article in 2006, suggesting a meteor impacted Madagascar around 4,800 years ago.  According to the Holocene Impact Working Group,the discovered crater appears to have been created by a meteor large enough to have caused a 600 foot tsunamis up and down Africa and the Middle East.  This article does not appear to be written by Christians (could be …

Carbon Dating and the Earth’s Magnetic Field

Monday, September 6th, 2010

One of the unfortunate arguments that Young Earth scientists make is that carbon dating is not accurate much beyond 5,000 years.  One of their arguments is that the ratio of C14 to C12 is not constant, and that scientists know it is not but conveniently ignore it.  Here is one such article: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible.  In it, the author makes several reasonable-sounding statements, which taken together would seem to be an indictment of radio-carbon dating.

The author accurately explains the basics of carbon dating before going into his criticism of the method.  In making the criticism however, he gets into trouble almost right off the bat…
A critical assumption used in carbon-14 dating has to do with this ratio. It is assumed that the ratio of …

“The Grand Design” - Stephen Hawking - Some questions I hope he will answer

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

I just read an interesting article about Stephen Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design”, which goes on sale next week.  According to the article…
He wrote in A Brief History … “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”

In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.
Whereas Hawking previously believed that God simply did not have to interfere with the Big Bang, but had caused it, he now …

What Came First, Sin or Original Sin?

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

As I wrote about in Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 3) - The others were in God’s image, too, most of the world today is not descended form Adam.  They were created in God’s image long before Adam.  Adam however is the first person to have been given a command to believe and obey from God, and so the first person to actually fall from grace.  The rest of the world was given no law from God, and so had no law to fall from.  What does that say …

Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 3) - The others were in God’s image, too

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

As wrote in Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 2) - Who else was there?, it would seem that most of the modern world did not initially descend from Adam, let alone Noah.  My list was not exhaustive, but according to fossil records, the following major populations of people have been around since before Adam:

China - 67,000 years
India - 30,000 years
Africa - 200,000 years
Native Americans - 16,500 - 40,000 years
Australia - 40,000 years
Middle East - 60,000 years

Adam descended from the Middle Eastern population, after it left Africa.  He lived somewhere around 6,000 to 10,000 …

Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 2) - Who else was there?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

As described in Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah, the recipients of God’s promise to never wipe out all people from a land are Noah and his descendants.  This was not the first time God excluded most of the world from a covenant (Adamic covenant was only with Adam and his descendants, not the rest of the world).  It would not be the last (The Mosaic covenant would only be with the descendants of Isaac).  That said, God reserves the right to graft non-recipients into a covenant, hence making them recipients if He so chooses.  Consider this passage from Romans 11…
 …

Genesis 9:1-3 - When did man start eating animals? (Part 3) - Was it Abel?

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

In Genesis 9:1-3 - When did man start eating animals? (Part 1) and Genesis 9:1-3 - When did man start eating animals? (Part 2), I make the assertion that mankind outside Adam and his descendants were eating animals long before Adam was even born.  Adam however was put into a garden, and given plants to eat and animals to care for.  When God cursed the ground, Adam’s descendants sinned further by eating the animals around them.  So, God used Noah to save representative samples of the animals there, killed off the people and remaining animals in their land, and then made the saved animals wild …

Genesis 9:1-3 - When did man start eating animals? (Part 2)

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

There are several arguments to be made, if one is to make the case that Genesis 9:3 is not the beginning of human carnivorism.  Theologically, they include the following:

Though sin can cause death, death is not sin
God’s statements in Genesis 9:1-3 were not a worldwide change
Adam’s descendants were eating meat already

Here is a good post to start with: 

Problems with Interpreting the Flood - Part 4 - Partial Revelation 

I have dealt with #1 at length already.  Here some good posts about it:

Genesis 2 - A recall of Genesis 1? No. …