Age of the Earth

Thoughts on 2020

/ J.K. / Leave a comment

Well, 2020 has been a garbage year. I am ready to turn the page on this year and start a new one, but there isn’t much hope that this coming year will be any better, at least not the first half or so. Even this post, two sentences in has gone off the rails; my goal was to attempt a ‘best things’ lazy year end post. I just got an email from a buddy who posted his ‘favorite things’ of the year, it was a top 10 in multiple categories. I was sitting here just trying to come up with three things I’ve posted that would be worth celebrating. 

Is hard to think of those things right now. We have had 9/11 level of deaths every day since the election (when it was supposed to magically go away, accord to ‘conservatives’), over 20,000 people died this past week (Merry Christmas), a little more than one in 1,000 Americans have died since March (and the ‘all lives matter’ crowd is quick to point out it is only the old and those with pre-existing conditions). All this, and that only has to do with Covid, which far too many people I know still downplay or straight out deny exists, including a distressing (and depressing) number of Christians. Similarly, those same people agree/support delusion of a president who, without any evidence or basis in any facts, has frequently claimed ‘fraud’ or ‘rigged’ election. He has been so busy doing this he hasn’t even mentioned the Christmas day suicide bomber/terrorist(?), who, luckily didn’t kill anyone but himself. Half of the SBC has seemingly gone insane in fear, and care more about denying racism than heterodox views of the Trinity.  This is also the year that school was canceled in my area for a hurricane and snow, within about two weeks from each other. 

It has been an exhausting year.  It has been bad for me on almost every level, mentally, emotionally, spiritually (though I’ve had some encouragement lately), physically. I sleep only a few hours a night, which would be cool if I was too tired to do something with my waking hours. Often I feel like I can’t go on. I might have to go full on crazy with big outlandish New Year’s resolutions just to shock the system. On top of the actual tragic events related to Covid (oh yeah, there is also a new more contagious strand now), this disaster of a president, the civil unrest around racial issues, WordPress updated to a new editor system and for me, it is just trash. It is clunky, has odd spacing, and randomly highlights things I’m not working on. Worst of all, you have to search around to find the ‘classic’ editor, just to link to your own site. You might be think that I just don’t know what I’m doing, that is obviously the case (this much should be clear by now), but that hasn’t stopped me before. To add to that, even our Christmas Eve service, which was a big outside production so we could space out and have open air, was cancelled due to weather. I am deeply concerned with the future of the church and the attendance after things are back to normal. Many people have not come back in person, even though they can. Unfortunately, some of those were planning to come to our outdoor service. I have some hope that more will return next year. 

So, here is my attempt, in no particular order to point to three things of 2020 that I enjoyed, which is as close to ‘best of’, as I can probably get to right now:

  1. Why not start with something still related to Covid. Working for the Government, I never had the opportunity to ‘shut down’ or quarantine for a time (I first went back to the office in early April). However, not much else was happening in the world, so most of the time, I just need to log on and check some things for those first few weeks. I attempted to start a ‘covid dairy’, it wasn’t very good, and was a much more appealing exercise when this was supposed to be temporary (in the short term sense). So, I would log on around 6:00 am and work for a few hours, this was back when the Nuggets took two naps a day, so I would then spend the morning with Sprout (going back to work after lunch). I wrote it about it here. I will certainly always remember the time, we logged 8-10 miles a day walking and exploring. She was about 5.5 at the time, so who knows. At one point she told me about a dream she had about driving a car, then told me her top five ‘musics’ (basically genres-ish). You can listen to here playlist here. 
  2. Our church started an incredibly ambitious sermon series of preaching through the entire Bible in and year and asking the the congregation to read the entire Bible in a year.  A spin off of this was that we started a video series of panel discussions called ‘that stuff in the Bible’, in which we discuss some of the wild, strange, or hard parts of the Bible. I was on the first panel, which of course (being in Genesis) was a discussion on the age of the Earth and evolution. I usually don’t do things like this, as I hate being in public view. I have terrible anxiety for these things, such that I basically didn’t eat that day or sleep the night afterward. However, I am proud of it and I think it turned out pretty well. Please watch it here. 
  3. I am really struggling for number three. I don’t have anything I can link to or post. I guess I will kind of cheat and tease something that will come later. I formed an idea for a project a few months ago and have been steadily working on it since. As I’ve alluded to in the past few posts, it might mean the end of MMT, but only insofar as it is a new chapter and time to move to something else. It should be fairly comprehensive, and we haven’t figured out all the aspects yet. Hopefully, there will be a few test runs soon to make sure it is worthwhile, and then a launch planned in March. If you never see that, then it failed to get off the ground, but some of the content will likely be ported over here, so either way, I hope to expand what I’m doing in some capacity, after a listless half decade of being a fake theologian.

That is it. That is all I have for 2020. Better luck next year.

We aren’t in Psalm 88, darkness is not my only companion, there is One who will pull us from the pit. 

Book Review: Language of God

/ J.K. / 1 Comment

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

My Rating: Must read

Level: Parts can get fairly technical, but Collins does a good job keeping it understandable; medium length (300+)

Summary

The book is broken into three parts, with two to six section in each. There is also an introduction and an appendix on bioethics. The three parts are: The Chasm Between Science and Faith, this is mostly autobiographical; The Great Questions of Human Existence, he starts with the physics of the beginning of the universe, then evolution, then his work on the Human Genome Project; and Faith in Science, Faith in God, which is the best part of the book and goes into what he calls the reactions to the evidence of science – Atheism/Agnosticism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, and BioLogos. 

My Thoughts

I appreciate what Collins has done with this book. I think it serves as a great intro for either people who are familiar, on the theological side, with the other ‘views’ of creation or as an intro to the science aspect of evolution, as understood by an evangelical Christian. The last section of the book serves as a mini ‘four views’ type book where we briefly reviews other positions and then states the issues he sees in them. If you are interested in this topic (creation/evolution) I think this book is a great place to start and then you can move on to deep dive type books such as Four Views on Creation (my review) for a better understanding of the different views (a mix of theology and science) or Four Views on the Historical Adam (my review) for more of a Biblical/Theological understanding. 

Age of the Earth Discussion Video

/ J.K. / 5 Comments

Watch me and friends from church discuss the age of the Earth (I’m the one who was freeze framed with my eyes closed):

I’ll point out for those curious, this was not meant to be a debate, but instead a discussion of general positions people hold, and which positions we hold in particular. There was so much more all of us wanted to say, but as you can see from the length of the video, we already failed our 45 minute hard stop. It seemed like every question and tangent could have been its own hour long discussion. 

As you can see, I’m not the best speaker, and apparently my mom was correct in that I cannot sit still and fidget too much. So I wanted to clarify or expand on a few things here. Like I said, this wasn’t a debate, so we didn’t really interact with each other’s positions that much, but this is my site, so I can do what I want. 

I thought that there would be a little more on the Literary Framework Interpretation, so I kind of cut it short, but it works better as a visual anyway. The main argument is that we have a symmetry where God creates ‘realms’ so to speak, and then fills those ‘realms’, then as Ruler of all and uncreated, He rests on the seventh day (which also establishes the Sabbath, which we didn’t get much into). It looks something like this:

Creation KingdomsCreature Kinds
Day 1: LightDay 4: Luminaries
Day 2: Sky/WaterDay 5: Birds/Fish
Day 3: Land/VegetationDay 6: Land animals/Man
The Creator King
Day 7: Sabbath

For people who are interested in a non-literal, chronological reading of Genesis 1, I think this a good understanding. Of course, and I thought we’d talk more about literal vs literary, very few people actually have a literal view. If they did, they would have to believe that there is a dome above the Earth (the firmament) that separates the waters from above. Very few people believe this anymore. Martin Luther was adamant that you had to have this view, while Calvin was a little more understanding that conception of cosmology has changed (though he was still a strident geocentrist).

I think that is something we have to wrestle with if we try a truly literal view from Old Testament cosmology. This was the debate around Galileo, that the Earth simply could not revolve around the sun. Why? Because the Psalms and Job said that the Earth is fixed on its foundation and cannot be moved. This is even attested to in the New Testament where we learn that the plan of salvation goes back to before the foundation of the world.

That is what changed my position, as I tried to state in the video. Nothing about science, but by learning about Ancient Near East cultures and their cosmology. Understanding Genesis in its place and world, helps you to understand the purpose.

As for evolutionary science, I don’t really care. If something came out tomorrow and all of sudden all scientist agreed that evolution was wrong all this time, that would not change my interpretation of Genesis. However, as it stands now, someone’s feeling or opinions are irrelevant to the science of evolution, it is established fact (for now, I suppose it could change). However, I maintain that this isn’t the point of Genesis and so to reiterate, I’ll end with the J.I. Packer quote I read last night:

I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and I maintain it in print, but exegetically I cannot see that anything Scripture says, in the first chapters of Genesis or elsewhere, bears on the biological theory of evolution one way or the other.