As you know HGV, there has been an ongoing debate between the 'ancient Earth' (4.5 billion years old) and 'young Earth' (6000 years old) schools of thought. I have been an engineer and scientist for all my life, so naturally I subscribed to the 'ancient Earth' timeline.
Recently I've been reading quite a few things that point out the problems with that viewpoint. Your writings here now one of them. Also Noah at https://wltreport.com/ has been making such arguments. One of the things I find fascinating is the fact that in the early times of the Bible people seemed to live for many hundreds of years. How could that be, unless the scriptures were figurative and not literal?
I don't know if you've heard about 'telomeres' -- these are bits of unnecessary DNA added onto the genes of living things, 'unnecessary' in that they do not provide essential DNA code required to build that living thing. Well, over time starting when we are born, inevitable genetic damage happens in the replication of our genes as we age, and most of this happens at the tips of the DNA strands. The effect of that is to reduce the lengths of our telomeres. This eventually affects the 'important' parts of our DNA, which causes defects in the creation of new cells in our body, resulting in degradation of said body and eventually can cause death (if we do not die first due to some external event). So our bodies age and eventually we die.
But this degradation in DNA also affects the genes passed down to succeeding generations, which when you think about it means that as we become an older species, the expected lifetime of each generation becomes a bit less than that which preceded, due to loss of telomeric DNA. So, it is not illogical to think that people who lived thousands of years earlier, would also have had much longer lifetimes.
Then people say, "But what about the dinosaurs?" Well, what of them? Did they really exist or did God create the fossils and layers of rock that all appeared by our 'measurements' to be hundreds of millions years old? I can't explain why God would have created the earth this way, but certainly He could have and apparently did. The same for the universe -- we assume that it must have been there for a long time because physicists have been able to create a theory that agrees with 'observations' that tells us the universe is tens of billions of years old. But there were no witnesses there to provide any justification of the theory.
Noah described this problem with a simple example. Suppose we walk into the kitchen and there is a coffee cup in the sink, and the faucet is dripping into it at a certain rate. We can easily measure that drip rate and how much water is in the cup, and deduce how long the cup has been there.
But it is likely that nobody watched that cup for the entire time, so we must make a set of assumptions (including 'uniformity' as you mention) to make that deduction. As long as all we have to determine the age of things, whether it is the time it took the faucet to fill the coffee cup or the age of Earth or the universe, based only on things that we can measure and know today, there is a critical set of assumptions that must be made to make that determination. And by definition, there is no way to validate those assumptions, and indeed it is the height of arrogance for us to claim we 'know' such facts when indeed, they rest on unproven (and unknowable) assumptions that are in reality as likely to be wrong as right. And the further back we try to estimate the age of something, the more likely those assumptions are to be wrong.
After all, if we can't really be sure how long that faucet has been dripping into the cup (a matter of hours perhaps), how in God's earth can we claim to 'know' the Earth is 4.5 billion years old? Answer, of course, is -- we cannot.
As you know HGV, there has been an ongoing debate between the 'ancient Earth' (4.5 billion years old) and 'young Earth' (6000 years old) schools of thought. I have been an engineer and scientist for all my life, so naturally I subscribed to the 'ancient Earth' timeline.
Recently I've been reading quite a few things that point out the problems with that viewpoint. Your writings here now one of them. Also Noah at https://wltreport.com/ has been making such arguments. One of the things I find fascinating is the fact that in the early times of the Bible people seemed to live for many hundreds of years. How could that be, unless the scriptures were figurative and not literal?
I don't know if you've heard about 'telomeres' -- these are bits of unnecessary DNA added onto the genes of living things, 'unnecessary' in that they do not provide essential DNA code required to build that living thing. Well, over time starting when we are born, inevitable genetic damage happens in the replication of our genes as we age, and most of this happens at the tips of the DNA strands. The effect of that is to reduce the lengths of our telomeres. This eventually affects the 'important' parts of our DNA, which causes defects in the creation of new cells in our body, resulting in degradation of said body and eventually can cause death (if we do not die first due to some external event). So our bodies age and eventually we die.
But this degradation in DNA also affects the genes passed down to succeeding generations, which when you think about it means that as we become an older species, the expected lifetime of each generation becomes a bit less than that which preceded, due to loss of telomeric DNA. So, it is not illogical to think that people who lived thousands of years earlier, would also have had much longer lifetimes.
Then people say, "But what about the dinosaurs?" Well, what of them? Did they really exist or did God create the fossils and layers of rock that all appeared by our 'measurements' to be hundreds of millions years old? I can't explain why God would have created the earth this way, but certainly He could have and apparently did. The same for the universe -- we assume that it must have been there for a long time because physicists have been able to create a theory that agrees with 'observations' that tells us the universe is tens of billions of years old. But there were no witnesses there to provide any justification of the theory.
Noah described this problem with a simple example. Suppose we walk into the kitchen and there is a coffee cup in the sink, and the faucet is dripping into it at a certain rate. We can easily measure that drip rate and how much water is in the cup, and deduce how long the cup has been there.
But it is likely that nobody watched that cup for the entire time, so we must make a set of assumptions (including 'uniformity' as you mention) to make that deduction. As long as all we have to determine the age of things, whether it is the time it took the faucet to fill the coffee cup or the age of Earth or the universe, based only on things that we can measure and know today, there is a critical set of assumptions that must be made to make that determination. And by definition, there is no way to validate those assumptions, and indeed it is the height of arrogance for us to claim we 'know' such facts when indeed, they rest on unproven (and unknowable) assumptions that are in reality as likely to be wrong as right. And the further back we try to estimate the age of something, the more likely those assumptions are to be wrong.
After all, if we can't really be sure how long that faucet has been dripping into the cup (a matter of hours perhaps), how in God's earth can we claim to 'know' the Earth is 4.5 billion years old? Answer, of course, is -- we cannot.
Beautifully stated!
I look forward to more of your insights!
There is a group called "Answers in Genesis" that takes an extremely scientific approach to answering those very questions!
God bless and safe travels!