Some Answers on a Thread of Group Creationism

Status of DL on group wall:

If the bible for some reason was missing Genesis 1 and 2 and the two genealogies in the gospels were not there would you still think that scientists were lying to you about an old earth or would the evidence suggest the world is 6000 years old and we don't need Genesis 1 and 2 to tell us this?

My answer to status:

"would you still think that scientists were lying to you about an old earth or would the evidence suggest the world is 6000 years old and we don't need Genesis 1 and 2 to tell us this?"

Neither. I would consider that Scientists were lying to themselves about the clarity of the evidence (even if I did not get to this before actually believing Genesis 1-2 and the genealogy of St Luke) and I would be looking at other historical datings of the world. How far back in time did Egyptian or Babylonian archaeology go? Is there historical evidence before Tolkien's life of the events in Silmarillion? How long ago was Atlantis? Etc. I would, in absence of Biblical authority, probably take pagan authority on world being 40.000 years old. And I would in doing so be a bit confused on whether God or the gods created earth.

My answers to some other points brought up:

"Matthew 1:6 says Jesus was the son of David through SOLOMON, but Luke 3: 31 says that Jesus was the son of David through NATHAN. Which one is correct?"

Matthew is correct about Jesus' juridical sonship through his stepfather St Joseph. Luke is correct about his physical sonship through the Blessed Virgin Mary (whose real grandfather was stepgrandfather to St Joseph or something, so Luke was also jurically correct about St Joseph, as Matthew was physically correct about him).

APART from this, if you descend from someone who lived centuries ago, you usually do so on more than one line of descent. A man being your father's father's father's father may also have been your mother's father's father's father through two other men, as well as being even your father's mother's mother's father. ANY genealogy of the Biblical type is of necessity a selection. If it uses the words "begat", one can exclude transitions from father in law to son in law marrying daughter of the first. It can also exclude stepfather and stepson relations. Now, the genealogy in Matthew uses the word begat. That in Luke does not.

"Geology (and they were christians) decided that the earth was older than 6000 years in the 1700's"

In the 1700's lots of Christians were Apostates. Even without evolution. Probably common acceptance of Heliocentrism had sth to do with that. The Church was right to condemn the two theses of Galileo, and he was right to condemn them himself, first publically, and later in his conscience.

"there are areas on the earth that show no flood."

Oh? What area has NO Cretaceous, NO Permian, NO Carboniferous or Missisippian, NO Palaeocene, NO Ediacaran, NO Cambrian, NO precambrian etc. fossils?

"Because Adam didn't have a scribe or a pen or scrolls."

He can have been the first scribe. But if instead he was passing along the story per oral tradition, the pre-Abrahamic and thus possibly pre-written accounts, passed down orally, come down in so short snippets that these can have been carefully formulated in sufficient brevity and clarity for correct oral transmission per learning by heart.

We cannot FOLLOW written accounts as if every piece of writing that was there has come down to us. Absense of direct evidence as in manuscripts is not evidence of absense.

Presence of a certain "total culture" remain of a certain community (thus not just things like the tombs of Abraham in Canaanite territory as it was then) with total absence of any writing is of course evidence of absence in that particular community, but not as for all contemporaries [thereof].

"It actually appears it was written long after moses was dead. Probably written during captivity in Babylon."

ALSO. By exact copying from scrolls brough along from pre-exile Jerusalem, copied from the series of scrolls preserved when Athaliah had tried to obliterate the law, which in turn were copied from scrolls going back to Moses.

THAT is what the story of books subsequent to Deuteronomy suggest very strongly as the history of the Mosaic texts.

Saying it was not only written but actually authored during captivity in Babylon is heretical.

[On the two genealogies again:]

"Creationists think they are for determining the age if the earth. Matthew would laugh at that."

1) Genealogy of St Matthew is for documenting Christ is Messiah of Israel. "Son of David Son of Abraham".

2) Genealogy of St Luke is for documenting Christ is descended from the first man in a line that has recalled what the Gentiles have forgotten. That He is therefore also redeemer of the Gentiles.

3) Genealogy of St Luke reaching back to Adam gives us the number of generations. And Genesis gives us the number of generations among these that were extra long lived. That a chronology was not the primary purpose of the genealogy does not preclude that the genealogy actually provides such a thing too. Biblical inerrancy does not mean it is "inerrant about whatever it really intends and purposes to make its main point, but fallible in sideissues" it means the Bible is inerrant in side issues as well as main points.