Re: Biblical Interpretation Reconsidered

A third observation: During my brief tenure as a YEC I read an article
in Ex Nihilo by Barry Setterfield which claimed that the speed of light
had declined from nearly infinite in Adam's time to its present 3*10^8
m/s. Since the expression for the rate of decay of radioactive
substances contains a factor of C, the speed of light, the effect of
the decline in the speed of light is to make radiometric dating give a
distorted result.

The problem with all this is that Setterfield used observations of C
going back to Roemer's results in the 1700's to today and extrapolated
backwards 6000 years. (The measurements actually show a slight decline
from Roemer's day to ours. Perhaps due to better instrumentation and
methodology?) What's even worse, he searched in a reference like the
Handbook of Mathematical Functions til he found a function that fit the
observations close to exactly, then he extrapolated backwards. This
was one of the most abysmal misuses of numerical data I had ever seen,
and it alerted me to the misuse of science in general by YEC's.

On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, at 03:16 PM, Jack Haas wrote:

> Greetings to the group.
>  
> I offer the following quote as all too typical of the way a large
> segment of the church regards scripture and nature:
> _______________________________
>  
> "...trust the Bible, as Jesus did (‘it is written’; ‘Scripture cannot
> be broken’ John 10:35). And Jesus never separated biblical morality
> from biblical history. Indeed, Jesus told Nicodemus (John 3:12): ‘I
> have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then
> will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?’ If Jesus was wrong
> about earthly things (like a recent creation and a global Flood—Luke
> 17:26–27), why should we believe what He says about heavenly things?
> And in the passage above, Jesus taught about the moral issue of
> marriage by connecting it with the fact of the creation of man and
> woman as Genesis says! The Sabbath commandment, another moral issue,
> was given explicitly because God created the heavens and earth in six
> normal-length days and ‘rested’ on the seventh day (Exodus 20:8–11).
> If you compromise the Bible, then what is to stop you from
> compromising Christ? We all need to learn to not take our views to the
> Bible but let the Bible dictate what our views should be. God is never
> wrong, so we should trust Him. If we elevate our words to be equal to
> God’s then we are trying to equate ourselves with God. If we regard
> ‘nature’ as the ‘67th book of the Bible’, as Dr **** teaches this
> means that man’s fallible science, which tells us of ‘nature’, has
> been elevated to the status of Scripture. That’s the problem. Remember
> John 1:1-3."
> __________________
>  
> Can any of you suggest an approach (or better have had success with an
> approach) that can move such believers from this "wooden" take on
> God's word?   Or, perhaps, what moved you from this view?
>  
> I'm preparing a collection of FAQs related to our interests from the
> list and other resources. (Names always deleted)
>  
> Thank you.
>  
> Jack Haas
>
Bill Hamilton Rochester, MI 248 652 4148
Received on Wed Dec 17 18:25:18 2003