I’m not sure what your last paragraph draws out other than a tautology. To say we can’t go beyond that seems to undercut the possibility of even drawing inferences about the existence of God. Of course, perhaps what you mean is that we can’t know that God necessarily exists, but that would confuse epistemology with ontology. Perhaps you could tell me what you mean to draw out there.

Regarding the first part of the post and the analysis of frames. It is necessarily the case that if something exists necessarily, it exists in every possible world, so I’m not sure how one could say that it isn’t about the actual world already.

I want to first bring up a question concerning the gaps in genealogies. I agree there could be gaps in certain places of the bible, and at one point you said that there’s a guesstimate of Adam living 150k years ago, do you believe that these gaps could account for 146,000 years? And what about the Genesis 5 genealogies? The gap view has failed to provide any evidence to demonstrate gaps in the Genesis 5 genealogy

Question 2, why does history only go back several thousands of years. Our first known writings are only about 5500 years old. The first story we can find, The Epic of Gilgamesh, dates somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BC. Did it take man tens of thousands of years to develop a written language?

Question 3 How do we as Christians rectify, or balance our belief that our God is good and yet He calls pain and suffering good? If “God delights in creating..” does He delight in all the disease, bloodshed, and death that took place during His act of creating. Does not scripture tell us that death is an enemy and that death is the direct response to sin?

Oy a kindred spirit umm I mean brother Lots of things you have said here seems to indicate we are on the same page. Which unlike others mean we haven’t decided what to write down yet. lol. So maybe we can help each other on our journey. YECs have it right that scripture has supremacy. I would like to see that more from the OEC perspective. However with no side taken by me yet JW ‘s point on day four is well taken and on the first part of Genesis 1 the OECs seem shaky. A strict reading of Genesis without any modern science interpolated tends to give alot of credence to today’s 24 hour days not being whats being spoken of.

However that can go either way in this debate. Take day one. It is not necessary at all and I’d say even unlikely that verse 2 is a part of the first day. Right now I take a VERY literal look at the first day. To me its the appearance of daylight and the evening and morning are the first day. You could have a long long night in verse two but its the appearance of light that caps that evening and morning first day. On the other hand it could be even shorter than a 24 hour period.

SO I find myself in No man’s land as to the earth with initial ground and water being even a hundred billion years old or 6,000 years not mattering biblically to me. If not for sedimentary rock and fossils I would take no issue at all on an old earth without even the slightest bit of discordance with a totally literal even hyper literal meaning for the Genesis account. HOWEVER just when you think I am leaning OEC all the way I have serious issues with especially the last day being anything but a day and it has little to do with the long battle over Yom. The age of Adam is stated in Genesis 5 . We are told all the days that Adam lived were 930 years point blank. If Day 6 is all about creating Adam as the scripture states then we are not talking about millions of years if Adam years come up to less than a thousand years.

SO though its true we might be able to fit in billions of years in day one by the time we get to genesis 5 the 6th day seems pretty nailed to the ground by the clearly stated age of adam. So my willingness to accept the earth itself being even billions of years old doesn’t do a thing for the bigger modern science issues of sedimentary rocks with fossils. Just as JW argues convincingly to me for a nonstandard day up to the Sun and Moon appear its hard to maintain millions of years after that. It works both ways

JW would love a link to wherever you talk about the ANE studies that you have looked at. Unfortunately those that i have seen pretty much only use that context to fudge their positions not prove their point. I’ve yet to find any that takes in the whole context of Judaism including the messianic Judaism of Christianity. We have hundreds even thousands of years of views that encompass Jesus’s statements , Psalms , The practice of the Sabbath etc. I’m having a hard time seeing the scriptural evidence for the kind of old earth creationism I see being suggested. the only thing I can come up with that makes sense is the Talmudic gap theory which predates the Church’s gap theory by hundreds of years (and why many jews have no issue whatsoever with modern geology – well almost none) and perhaps seeing the seven days as sequential but not consecutive days from the perspective of God (which leads really nowhere toward fitting in with modern naturalistic geology).

As far as your second point – “God delights in creating….” Beautifully said.

Regarding the argument “IF the earth is 6 – 10K years old, he made it look like it’s 4.54 billion years old.”

I used to argue in just this fashion. It made the most sense to me. But on reflection, I think it makes God into a deceiver. I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Now I’m more sure of where you’re coming from. Forgive me for initially taking it as an argument for a young earth–I’ve seen that question presented as such before.

You wrote, “My best response is that if the earth is 4.5 billion years old and humanity is 150,000 years old, how could humans possibly contend to be a significant portion of His plan? (which we are according to His word (or my interpretation of it)) How could we pretend to be more than a drop in the cosmic bucket?”

One could look at it that way, but I think one could paint a different picture. First, God is timeless, as in God transcends time. Categories of time do not apply to God. Thus, for God to “take time” doing something is simply a malformed statement (in the philosophical sense). Second, here’s the story: God delights in creating. As He formed the cosmos, he continually had in it His plan of salvation, foreknowing that humans would fall. He aligned the heavens, brought forth the stars, and breathed life into man. All of the heavens were shaped so that humans could come forth at the right time for humanity to flourish. (For an exploration of the fine tuning, see Hugh Ross, “Why the Universe is the Way It Is“.)

Am I speaking metaphorically? Am I speaking literally? Yes, I’m painting a cosmology, just as is Genesis 1.

Yes and according to Genesis 1:21′s Command from God sea and bird life was particularly abundant so that the initial state of the marine populations were very high to begin with even before reproduction. Still if the Karoo claim were actually based on real data and not on guess work it would be compelling. However from everything I see they are not.

I missed the importance of the first line but I do not understand it. You were responding to my posts about biological systems living longer and procreating more often. The entire conversation I have been having is based on how long humans lived.

However gaps in genealogies has absolutely nothing to to do with the age of Methuselah that I was talking about and again I know of NO study that changes the meaning of “the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years; and he died” that relies on the Hebrew. None. My point if you go back and read my posts was about how long people lived not whether gaps existed in genealogies. I finally gather by your insistence on that point even now that you have been attempting to answer a point I never made and we are arguing entirely different points, I hope you can see that now – How long someone lives is a separate issue from how many years elapse between one person and their ancestors

I know at this point you think I am just being snarky but trust me when I say I am frustrated by the state of the dialogue between both sides it is honest and sincere. Don’t think for an instance I am accusing you alone of this. You go to the young earth people and they are blasting Old earth,. You go to many old earth and they are blasting Young earth. You then find out that you know what? They both have some points but they are so busy riding rough shod over each other they no longer think they have to listen. Not to offend but in all honesty I see that as a key component of why we are having this disagreement on totally different points with neither one of us talking about the same thing. Far too much anticipation of where the other is coming from.

Why is that so frustrating (and I don’t use that word lightly) to someone like me? I’m trying to figure out where the truth lies and you can barely find a single site anywhere where the other side is not so entrenched that they can walk though both sides and give the honest pros and cons. The real kicker is I have found out that each side unwittingly is in fact lying about the other in the sense that they end up because of this demeanor to each other creating caricatures of the others positions that are from from the truth and the end up being so dismissive of each other they end up rebutting strawmen. .

SO again my point is on the age people lived to and I maintain with no qualms whatsoever that changing the clear Hebrew of a passage like Genesis 5:27 would not be an exegetical study on Hebrew but a prime example of eisegesis and nothing but an opinion piece.