mattrose wrote:I think it fits best with God's love (the most important theological truth), since other views necessitate millions and millions of years of death and decay. I think it fits best with our doctrine of sin coming through one man, since other views see lots of sin and violence in the world prior to the first humans.
Words like death, decay, and violence have no theological significance apart from moral creatures with free will. They're simply part of how the world works. There can be no life without death, apart from the Tree of Life, of course, from which only Adam & Eve ate; there was no Tree of Life for animals. Decay is simply other creatures living their lives as God designed them. And violence -- Jesus said God feeds the birds; did He mean only the herbivorous ones? Doesn't He feed the carnivores too?
I think it fits best with eschatology, since the Bible seems to speak of Noah's flood as a world wide judgment to be repeated in the future.
As far as judgment is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the flood covered the entire planet, or killed all non-human life. What matters is, it killed all the people except those on the ark. The Bible text doesn't require that it covered the whole planet, only the part where man was present.
I think it fits best with theological anthropology, since the Bible says humans alone were created in the image of God (did God just zap the first people with it after a long line of creatures almost genetically indistinguishable from their successors?).
This is an argument against theistic evolution, but not against old-earth creationism. OEC says God specifically created each species, including the pre-human hominids, to fill specific niches at specific times. The fact that He re-used certain design features doesn't imply evolution; it implies that He's a good designer who does things efficiently, just like good human designers do.
This argument is all built on the rhetorical assumption that the earth looks very old. As I stated above, I think you're already into the realm of interpretation when state that as a fact.
It's far from rhetorical assumption, and is based on far more than the superficial "way things look." The physical universe is not simply a monolithic pile of stuff; it's an extremely complex web of intricate parts that all have to work together, none of which can be changed without setting off cascading changes through everything else. There's a lot we don't know, but there's much more than you or I will ever understand, that is known and very well understood. For example, when YECs say the speed of light may have changed, they're pulling it out of the air to make a belief system work with certain commonly known scientific facts. But when physicists say the speed of light can't possibly have ever changed without rendering life and maybe even the entire physical universe impossible, they're basing it on well-understood hard science -- way above your or my pay grade, but hard science nonetheless.
I am suggesting that one of the devil's strategies has been to create a worldview of naturalism that pulls all people in its direction. This plays itself out in such a way that Christians feel more and more ashamed of supernatural claims and are more and more led to believe in more naturalistic belief systems.
No doubt this is indeed part of the devil's strategy. That being the case, the prominent YEC activists play right into his hand by forcing it to be a divisive issue and causing many Christians to believe they have to be either YEC or not a Christian. From there, cognitive dissonance forces many to see no choice but to abandon at least part of their faith. Such a pointless tragedy, all the more tragic because it could be so easily avoided by the application of a little grace in place of the divisiveness.
I could see some theological advantage to the old earth perspective (it certainly would seem to illustrate God's patience well). I just have a hard time fathoming how an all-wise God would pick a plan that involved millions and millions of years just to get to the point where some creature could seriously be called an image bearer of the Almighty. Certainly God would not have been dependent on doing it in this way, right?
God can do things however He likes, of course. But why would the time element matter to God? To OEC, it seems obvious that an all-wise, eternal God will do things in whatever way He sees best, with no reference to any time element. Not to mention, a 13.8-billion-year-long process, every tiny detail intricately preplanned and executed at exactly the right moment, just so we humans would have a suitable place to live for an infinitesimally short blink of an eye of a few thousand years -- that says a hundred times more about not only His patience, but also His love, majesty, glory, and many other attributes, than can ever be squeezed from a 144-hour *poof*. At least, that's certainly my impression after being YEC most of my life, and then looking into and coming to understand what OEC really says (as opposed to the common YEC mischaracterizations of it).
Are you asking how I come to the conclusion that Jesus was a young earth creationist? I think that his statements most readily lead me to believe that Genesis 1-11 were genuine history, not myth.
Again, an argument against theistic evolution, but not against old-earth creationism. OEC also believes Genesis is genuine, literal history.
