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When I read such news, I wonder how people reconcile such discoveries backed by scientific validation, with religious texts that provide other timelines and exp

When I read such news, I wonder how people reconcile such discoveries backed by scientific validation, with religious texts that provide other timelines and explanations.

checkyoursudo 8y ago
The few YEC people I've read who actually attempt a reconciliation, rather than just ignore it, tend to disbelieve the dating methodologies.
ur-whale 8y ago
They don't, or rather don't feel the need to: Each story lives in parts of their brain that are entirely segregated from one another.
zw123456 8y ago
I can give one example explanation. My Father is an evangelical Christian (FYI, I am not, I am an atheist and a science enthusiast). I have asked him this exact same question out of curiosity. Here is the answer he gave (albeit just one perspective). He said "God is so powerful that he can do anything including placing all that evidence there to test our faith". That shuts down any reason to continue a conversation (needless to say this is a topic we generally avoid). Someone once said (not sure the attribution) "never try to reason with someone who has irrational beliefs".
- apocalypstyx 8y ago
  Which, of course, leads to an even better double-bind, in that it creates a situation of functional equivalence, because, if God makes the universe look and operate as if it is X billion years old, all inquiry and prediction based upon evidence of that conclusion will, by definition, be accurate. So it may not be the "truth", but from the perspective of living in it, that doesn't matter in the least. And if it only comes up as a matter in the afterlife, (that is, heaven doesn't like the given individual for acting upon the lie) there's another twist in the bind presented: that is God wants the given individual to live, but to do so requires interfacing with the rules of physical reality, which means accepting the predictive power of the "lie".
  - ant6n 8y ago
    True. The real test of faith is actually accepting billions of years of planetary development and evolution, and still believing in god.
- rumcajz 8y ago
  Bertrand Russell: "But if once such possibilities are admitted, there is no reason to place the creation of the world at one point rather than another. We may have all come into existence five minutes ago, provided with ready-made memories, with holes in our socks and hair that needed cutting. But although this is a logical possibility, nobody can believe it."
  - wolf550e 8y ago
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism
    - caf 8y ago
      The really neat bit is that the concept of Last Thursdayism itself, along with Bertrand Russell, was also one of those things created entirely last Thursday.
- yeukhon 8y ago
  I downvoted you because people who have religious faith are not always irrational people. This is a cruel way to judge those who believe in higher beings. Watch your words, seriously. My response is simply that we concept of time in religious text is not what we think it is. I think science exists and God also exists. Plenty of scientisits believe in God and science at the same time. Are you going to quote and say they are also irrational? Sigh. I may be an angry engineer but I don’t think you should imply all of us as irrational. Don’t do that. You are insulting everyone who believe in a religion for having belief in “irrational beliefs”.
  - Retra 8y ago
    You think it is rational to feel insulted when you are told you are being irrational? What goal are you optimizing for, and how do your actions facilitate the fastest means to converge on it?
    - yeukhon 8y ago
      Why is it not rational to feel insulted in the first place? Do I need permission and science to feel insulted? Is psychology irrational, then Definition of irrationality: > the quality of being illogical or unreasonable. What part of what I said is irrational? Calling people having faith in religion is holding irrational belief? Irrational is a negative word, not a positive word unless you think we are talking about mathematics.
      - sofal 8y ago
        It is dangerous when your set of beliefs are held as above reproach such that any criticism of them is considered insulting. These are defense mechanisms that act to insulate ideas from scrutiny, and they're used to keep people indoctrinated into whatever their group's ideology happens to be. If you can't handle your beliefs being questioned or called out as irrational without resorting to feeling personally attacked and calling for apologies, then you're not yet prepared to have an honest conversation about whether you're justified in having those beliefs.
      - 8y ago
- lisper 8y ago
  Your father's beliefs are not necessarily irrational, they are just based on different assumptions. Your assumption is that the order in the universe arises from causality and physical law. His assumption is that the order in the universe arises from purpose, i.e. he believes in teleology. That is not in and of itself irrational.
  - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
    This is a little confused. A theist could easily say that the 'universe arises from causality and physical law', but that God set in motion those laws (deism). A popular form of proto-biology in the early nineteenth century, 'natural theology', committed itself to studying the natural world because it believed that God's divine genius was manifest in its splendour, intricacy, and so on. Also, one could say that the 'universe arises from casuality and physical law', and observes a teleological direction. Most Enlightenment philosophers in the eighteenth century believed that both were true.
    - lisper 8y ago
      Sure. I don't see how anything you said is at odds with what I said.
      - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
        Well it is. Your implied opposition was that theology is based upon teleology; atheism upon a belief in physical laws. But a atheist could believe the former, and a theologian the latter. So it hardly works.
        lisper 8y ago
        > Your implied opposition was that theology is based upon teleology No. Not "is". Could be. Big difference.
        Emma_Goldman 8y ago
- posterboy 8y ago
  Taking the response in good faith I would assume that it's just showing the way the debate could go. It's rather constructive, whereas asking why repeatedly, seeking to arrive at a contradiction, is a fool's errand that may work both ways. Proof by contradiction is an important tactic to weed out misconceptions, but the strategy for communication is to find common agreement. Faith is a loaded term, so in effect the response opens up the meta level to your believes about faith. Indeed, I wouldn't go there out on a limb, either, if I don't have anything to add.
- zw123456 8y ago
  I am not sure it is ok to reply to yourself, but I was not sure where to put this. First, I appreciate all the thoughtful comments and would not down vote any of them. Just to level set, when I say that I think my Fathers beliefs are irrational, I don't mean that in a derisive way, I simply mean they are not fact based or not based on logical reasoning. That is sort of the basis for faith I think. But I am not being disrespectful, I simply choose a different path that is science based.
  - sofal 8y ago
    I agree with you, but I would also want to clarify that there is an important difference between being respectful to people and being respectful to strongly held beliefs. The former is important for a peaceful society, and the latter gives undue protection to ideas that may not merit it. The two are often conflated because many people are trained to identify very strongly with what they've been taught, and to feel personally insulted and attacked when their beliefs are called into question.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  The Bible repeatedly states that God cannot lie. Your father is making God out to be a liar. If it comes up again, if you want to start a fight, that's a direction you could go.
- Brockenstein 8y ago
  >He said "God is so powerful that he can do anything including placing all that evidence there to test our faith". So his God is a deceiver. It's impossible to know the truth about anything in that universe. Because you don't know, can't know, when God is putting a finger on the scale. That sort of reasoning reminds me of: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-god.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-god.html Q7. So if God directed evolution, why not just say he created everything at once? Mainly because all the evidence suggests otherwise. If God created the universe suddenly, he created it in a state that is indistinguishable from true age. If he did create it that way there must be a reason, otherwise God is a liar. Whatever that reason may be, a universe that is exactly like one that is old should be treated as if it were old.
gbear605 8y ago
One simple technique is to say that the fossils or whatever were intentionally placed there to make the world seem to be older than it is.
apocalypstyx 8y ago
They give their children story books with pictures of a tyrannosaur trying to dog-paddle with its pathetic little forearms, while the ark sails away in the distance (because that's why they don't exist no more). Source: my childhood.
stephen_g 8y ago
Not sure about other belief systems, but most scientists who are Christian at least would consider your question to be a ‘category error’. Science is generally limited to explaining questions of ‘how’ things happen, while the belief in a creating/sustaining God is believed to be explaining questions of ‘why’. Professor of Mathematics and Christian John Lennox had a fairly good quote saying that he doesn’t believe as a “God of the gaps” but a “God of the whole thing”, in that a Christian doesn’t believe that science being able to explain mechanisms diminishes God in any way, because if a God is in control/sustaining the universe then pretty much everything that science explains can be simultaneously brought about by God. The whole young earth thing is strangely popular in America but not really strongly held in general mainstream Christianity or (I believe) in mainstream Judaism. There is plenty of scholarship going back thousands of years (back to Augustine circa 4th century AD, or even Phillo of Alexandria in 1st C) who believed that the author of Genesis didn’t intend the first few chapters to be read as attesting literal time periods or mechanisms but convey theological truths about God and humanity. So while fundie YEC people would probably have a problem with this finding, generally mainstream believers and Christian scientists have no problem with this as just being a step in a process that God causes to occur to intentionally bring about life including humans.
- elboru 8y ago
  Thank you I think you explained it really well. >The whole young earth thing is strangely popular in America but not really strongly held in general mainstream Christianity or (I believe) in mainstream Judaism. I’m not American, so it has always been weird to me how the early earth thing is widely associated with Christianity, I mean, I have no doubt there must be people really believing on it. But from a non American and non Protestant Christian point of view it is just weird. But my guess is that it must be associated with “Sola Scriptura” and the free and individual interpretation of the Bible some Protestants believe in.
  - sofal 8y ago
    I don't understand why it is weird to believe in a young Earth, but it is not weird to believe that a god literally became a blood sacrifice to himself in order to save us from his wrath or any of the other stories from the Bible that modern theologians still consider literal, undeniable truth.
drb91 8y ago
The mind is agile and can reconcile many things—for one, all evidence is falsifiable by a god. I’m more curious what people psychologically get out of taking the bible literally. It wouldn’t make me happy.
LargeWu 8y ago
Many mainline Christians treat most of the Old Testament, especially scientifically implausible parts like Genesis, as tradition, and not literal fact. These are things that are perhaps taught in Sunday school to children, but not treated very seriously from a historical or scientific perspective. This very morning in my church discussion group, we each had a list of questions to discuss our perspective on. This particular gal had the question, "What's your favorite traditional Christian symbol?" Her answer was "the Jesus fish, and the evolved Jesus fish with legs". They are not incompatible given how our denomination tries to understand God.
skeleton 8y ago
One day I wondered where dinosaurs fit into christianity. I know next to nothing about christianity but I think it includes the belief that humans were on Earth pretty soon after Earth's creation, which meant either christianity rejected the dinosaur's existence or they lived alongside humans, which would be a pretty neat scenario to imagine. If I recall correctly the common explanations I found were that humans did in fact live alongside dinosaurs, and that dinosaurs lived and died within the first few days of their creation for whatever reason. One article I read on a christian website also said that the dating of dinosaur fossils by scientists was incorrect because bones don't have timestamp labels on them so there's no way one could know. In regards to "I wonder how people reconcile such discoveries backed by scientific validation" I think it's quite often simply unsubstantiated rejection.
gpm 8y ago
I've never understood why this is an issue. If I'm god, and I'm creating a planet for humans, and I made humans the curious beings that they are, would I: a) Create an earth that is boring with no history to dig into and explore b) Create a rich and storied history with things for them to wonder at Now, I mean, if I was god I would chose option b. Even in the alternate reality where I would personally chose option a I don't see any reason to think that the actual god couldn't have chosen option b. I'm not religious or well versed in Christianity, but I'm not aware of any reason why option b is inconsistent with the bible (the one possible exception is the flood story, but that is easily explained away by god fixing the earth afterwards).
- aggie 8y ago
  Your argument is a plausible retcon of the bible, but the "God made it that way" mechanism is essentially infinitely flexible and unfalsifiable. The problem with that is for many people, falsifiability is an important aspect of evidence-based belief (judged by predictive or explanatory value). Even if your explanation for why there are fossils etc. sounds sort of reasonable, if you grant this reinterpretation of the Christian creation myth, you've established that the goalposts can be moved, and from there you can find a way to move them for just about anything. Imagine we uncover a convincing, contemporaneous writing of Jesus' proclamation that he is merely a human. You could say, "Well God put that writing there to test our faith."
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    I think the issue is how one is valued over the other. Science's "proof" is based on an assumption(s), and then faith is put into those. To say to someone of religious faith "you can't bbe right because we have proof" completely overlooks science's base assumption, and dismiss the possibilty that said assumption(s) might be off target. Yes. It's a fine line. None the less faith is faith regardless of how well you rationalize it.
    - sofal 8y ago
      Science's "assumption" is that you can understand the world through repeated and verifiable observation. Faith, on the other hand, is the excuse people give for believing in something when they don't have a good reason.

When I read such news, I wonder how people reconcile such discoveries backed by scientific validation, with religious texts that provide other timelines and explanations.

checkyoursudo 8y ago

The few YEC people I've read who actually attempt a reconciliation, rather than just ignore it, tend to disbelieve the dating methodologies.

ur-whale 8y ago

They don't, or rather don't feel the need to: Each story lives in parts of their brain that are entirely segregated from one another.

zw123456 8y ago

I can give one example explanation. My Father is an evangelical Christian (FYI, I am not, I am an atheist and a science enthusiast). I have asked him this exact same question out of curiosity. Here is the answer he gave (albeit just one perspective). He said "God is so powerful that he can do anything including placing all that evidence there to test our faith". That shuts down any reason to continue a conversation (needless to say this is a topic we generally avoid). Someone once said (not sure the attribution) "never try to reason with someone who has irrational beliefs".

apocalypstyx 8y ago
Which, of course, leads to an even better double-bind, in that it creates a situation of functional equivalence, because, if God makes the universe look and operate as if it is X billion years old, all inquiry and prediction based upon evidence of that conclusion will, by definition, be accurate. So it may not be the "truth", but from the perspective of living in it, that doesn't matter in the least. And if it only comes up as a matter in the afterlife, (that is, heaven doesn't like the given individual for acting upon the lie) there's another twist in the bind presented: that is God wants the given individual to live, but to do so requires interfacing with the rules of physical reality, which means accepting the predictive power of the "lie".
- ant6n 8y ago
  True. The real test of faith is actually accepting billions of years of planetary development and evolution, and still believing in god.
rumcajz 8y ago
Bertrand Russell: "But if once such possibilities are admitted, there is no reason to place the creation of the world at one point rather than another. We may have all come into existence five minutes ago, provided with ready-made memories, with holes in our socks and hair that needed cutting. But although this is a logical possibility, nobody can believe it."
- wolf550e 8y ago
  https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism
  - caf 8y ago
    The really neat bit is that the concept of Last Thursdayism itself, along with Bertrand Russell, was also one of those things created entirely last Thursday.
yeukhon 8y ago
I downvoted you because people who have religious faith are not always irrational people. This is a cruel way to judge those who believe in higher beings. Watch your words, seriously. My response is simply that we concept of time in religious text is not what we think it is. I think science exists and God also exists. Plenty of scientisits believe in God and science at the same time. Are you going to quote and say they are also irrational? Sigh. I may be an angry engineer but I don’t think you should imply all of us as irrational. Don’t do that. You are insulting everyone who believe in a religion for having belief in “irrational beliefs”.
- Retra 8y ago
  You think it is rational to feel insulted when you are told you are being irrational? What goal are you optimizing for, and how do your actions facilitate the fastest means to converge on it?
  - yeukhon 8y ago
    Why is it not rational to feel insulted in the first place? Do I need permission and science to feel insulted? Is psychology irrational, then Definition of irrationality: > the quality of being illogical or unreasonable. What part of what I said is irrational? Calling people having faith in religion is holding irrational belief? Irrational is a negative word, not a positive word unless you think we are talking about mathematics.
    - sofal 8y ago
      It is dangerous when your set of beliefs are held as above reproach such that any criticism of them is considered insulting. These are defense mechanisms that act to insulate ideas from scrutiny, and they're used to keep people indoctrinated into whatever their group's ideology happens to be. If you can't handle your beliefs being questioned or called out as irrational without resorting to feeling personally attacked and calling for apologies, then you're not yet prepared to have an honest conversation about whether you're justified in having those beliefs.
    - 8y ago
lisper 8y ago
Your father's beliefs are not necessarily irrational, they are just based on different assumptions. Your assumption is that the order in the universe arises from causality and physical law. His assumption is that the order in the universe arises from purpose, i.e. he believes in teleology. That is not in and of itself irrational.
- Emma_Goldman 8y ago
  This is a little confused. A theist could easily say that the 'universe arises from causality and physical law', but that God set in motion those laws (deism). A popular form of proto-biology in the early nineteenth century, 'natural theology', committed itself to studying the natural world because it believed that God's divine genius was manifest in its splendour, intricacy, and so on. Also, one could say that the 'universe arises from casuality and physical law', and observes a teleological direction. Most Enlightenment philosophers in the eighteenth century believed that both were true.
  - lisper 8y ago
    Sure. I don't see how anything you said is at odds with what I said.
    - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
      Well it is. Your implied opposition was that theology is based upon teleology; atheism upon a belief in physical laws. But a atheist could believe the former, and a theologian the latter. So it hardly works.
      - lisper 8y ago
        > Your implied opposition was that theology is based upon teleology No. Not "is". Could be. Big difference.
        Emma_Goldman 8y ago
posterboy 8y ago
Taking the response in good faith I would assume that it's just showing the way the debate could go. It's rather constructive, whereas asking why repeatedly, seeking to arrive at a contradiction, is a fool's errand that may work both ways. Proof by contradiction is an important tactic to weed out misconceptions, but the strategy for communication is to find common agreement. Faith is a loaded term, so in effect the response opens up the meta level to your believes about faith. Indeed, I wouldn't go there out on a limb, either, if I don't have anything to add.
zw123456 8y ago
I am not sure it is ok to reply to yourself, but I was not sure where to put this. First, I appreciate all the thoughtful comments and would not down vote any of them. Just to level set, when I say that I think my Fathers beliefs are irrational, I don't mean that in a derisive way, I simply mean they are not fact based or not based on logical reasoning. That is sort of the basis for faith I think. But I am not being disrespectful, I simply choose a different path that is science based.
- sofal 8y ago
  I agree with you, but I would also want to clarify that there is an important difference between being respectful to people and being respectful to strongly held beliefs. The former is important for a peaceful society, and the latter gives undue protection to ideas that may not merit it. The two are often conflated because many people are trained to identify very strongly with what they've been taught, and to feel personally insulted and attacked when their beliefs are called into question.
andrewflnr 8y ago
The Bible repeatedly states that God cannot lie. Your father is making God out to be a liar. If it comes up again, if you want to start a fight, that's a direction you could go.
Brockenstein 8y ago
>He said "God is so powerful that he can do anything including placing all that evidence there to test our faith". So his God is a deceiver. It's impossible to know the truth about anything in that universe. Because you don't know, can't know, when God is putting a finger on the scale. That sort of reasoning reminds me of: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-god.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-god.html Q7. So if God directed evolution, why not just say he created everything at once? Mainly because all the evidence suggests otherwise. If God created the universe suddenly, he created it in a state that is indistinguishable from true age. If he did create it that way there must be a reason, otherwise God is a liar. Whatever that reason may be, a universe that is exactly like one that is old should be treated as if it were old.

gbear605 8y ago

One simple technique is to say that the fossils or whatever were intentionally placed there to make the world seem to be older than it is.

apocalypstyx 8y ago

They give their children story books with pictures of a tyrannosaur trying to dog-paddle with its pathetic little forearms, while the ark sails away in the distance (because that's why they don't exist no more). Source: my childhood.

stephen_g 8y ago

Not sure about other belief systems, but most scientists who are Christian at least would consider your question to be a ‘category error’. Science is generally limited to explaining questions of ‘how’ things happen, while the belief in a creating/sustaining God is believed to be explaining questions of ‘why’. Professor of Mathematics and Christian John Lennox had a fairly good quote saying that he doesn’t believe as a “God of the gaps” but a “God of the whole thing”, in that a Christian doesn’t believe that science being able to explain mechanisms diminishes God in any way, because if a God is in control/sustaining the universe then pretty much everything that science explains can be simultaneously brought about by God. The whole young earth thing is strangely popular in America but not really strongly held in general mainstream Christianity or (I believe) in mainstream Judaism. There is plenty of scholarship going back thousands of years (back to Augustine circa 4th century AD, or even Phillo of Alexandria in 1st C) who believed that the author of Genesis didn’t intend the first few chapters to be read as attesting literal time periods or mechanisms but convey theological truths about God and humanity. So while fundie YEC people would probably have a problem with this finding, generally mainstream believers and Christian scientists have no problem with this as just being a step in a process that God causes to occur to intentionally bring about life including humans.

elboru 8y ago
Thank you I think you explained it really well. >The whole young earth thing is strangely popular in America but not really strongly held in general mainstream Christianity or (I believe) in mainstream Judaism. I’m not American, so it has always been weird to me how the early earth thing is widely associated with Christianity, I mean, I have no doubt there must be people really believing on it. But from a non American and non Protestant Christian point of view it is just weird. But my guess is that it must be associated with “Sola Scriptura” and the free and individual interpretation of the Bible some Protestants believe in.
- sofal 8y ago
  I don't understand why it is weird to believe in a young Earth, but it is not weird to believe that a god literally became a blood sacrifice to himself in order to save us from his wrath or any of the other stories from the Bible that modern theologians still consider literal, undeniable truth.

drb91 8y ago

The mind is agile and can reconcile many things—for one, all evidence is falsifiable by a god. I’m more curious what people psychologically get out of taking the bible literally. It wouldn’t make me happy.

LargeWu 8y ago

Many mainline Christians treat most of the Old Testament, especially scientifically implausible parts like Genesis, as tradition, and not literal fact. These are things that are perhaps taught in Sunday school to children, but not treated very seriously from a historical or scientific perspective. This very morning in my church discussion group, we each had a list of questions to discuss our perspective on. This particular gal had the question, "What's your favorite traditional Christian symbol?" Her answer was "the Jesus fish, and the evolved Jesus fish with legs". They are not incompatible given how our denomination tries to understand God.

skeleton 8y ago

One day I wondered where dinosaurs fit into christianity. I know next to nothing about christianity but I think it includes the belief that humans were on Earth pretty soon after Earth's creation, which meant either christianity rejected the dinosaur's existence or they lived alongside humans, which would be a pretty neat scenario to imagine. If I recall correctly the common explanations I found were that humans did in fact live alongside dinosaurs, and that dinosaurs lived and died within the first few days of their creation for whatever reason. One article I read on a christian website also said that the dating of dinosaur fossils by scientists was incorrect because bones don't have timestamp labels on them so there's no way one could know. In regards to "I wonder how people reconcile such discoveries backed by scientific validation" I think it's quite often simply unsubstantiated rejection.

gpm 8y ago

I've never understood why this is an issue. If I'm god, and I'm creating a planet for humans, and I made humans the curious beings that they are, would I: a) Create an earth that is boring with no history to dig into and explore b) Create a rich and storied history with things for them to wonder at Now, I mean, if I was god I would chose option b. Even in the alternate reality where I would personally chose option a I don't see any reason to think that the actual god couldn't have chosen option b. I'm not religious or well versed in Christianity, but I'm not aware of any reason why option b is inconsistent with the bible (the one possible exception is the flood story, but that is easily explained away by god fixing the earth afterwards).

aggie 8y ago
Your argument is a plausible retcon of the bible, but the "God made it that way" mechanism is essentially infinitely flexible and unfalsifiable. The problem with that is for many people, falsifiability is an important aspect of evidence-based belief (judged by predictive or explanatory value). Even if your explanation for why there are fossils etc. sounds sort of reasonable, if you grant this reinterpretation of the Christian creation myth, you've established that the goalposts can be moved, and from there you can find a way to move them for just about anything. Imagine we uncover a convincing, contemporaneous writing of Jesus' proclamation that he is merely a human. You could say, "Well God put that writing there to test our faith."
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  I think the issue is how one is valued over the other. Science's "proof" is based on an assumption(s), and then faith is put into those. To say to someone of religious faith "you can't bbe right because we have proof" completely overlooks science's base assumption, and dismiss the possibilty that said assumption(s) might be off target. Yes. It's a fine line. None the less faith is faith regardless of how well you rationalize it.
  - sofal 8y ago
    Science's "assumption" is that you can understand the world through repeated and verifiable observation. Faith, on the other hand, is the excuse people give for believing in something when they don't have a good reason.