I am a revert to Catholicism from atheism. I was a product of the public schools and well versed in all the scientific dogma they try to pass off as science. During that time, when I was struggling to understand my faith, if I asked a Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic, about the Big Bang or about Evolution, I would simply be told not to ask stupid questions. That was not the case if I asked an atheist. They welcomed questions and gladly threw in their opinions about Church and religion as well. So, I quickly came to the conclusion, something which I had long suspected to be true, Christianity was a fiction which someone was passing off as the truth.
When I first came back to the Church, I was a product of prayer, meditation and a student of the Mystics and Saints. I had forgotten the questions and doubts which led me to atheism in my youth.
Then I became a Catechist.
Suddenly, all the questions and doubts, the cynical comments, the objections came pouring back. But not from me. They were coming from my students. My students were mostly public school children well versed in the theories of the Big Bang and Evolution. And they asked many probing and skeptical questions. The very same questions I had asked at their age.
And I didn't have an answer. At least, not answers that I liked. You see, I also was taught in public schools and I was thoroughly familiar with the Big Bang and Evolution. Theories which I found thoroughly plausible but which my traditionally trained Catholic and nonCatholic Christian friends told me completely opposed Christian teaching and the Bible.
So, I prayed. Then, in 1996, I read that Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution was not necessarily against Catholic teaching.
So, I prayed some more. And I think I received many answers.
One caveat, I am a layman. The answers I am providing are binding on no one. I believe these answers are true and I have educated my own children based upon these ways of correlating our faith and some scientific theories. Also, I believe these are the types of answers I was looking for when I was questioning Christianity as a child.
I pray that these answers may be a help and not a hindrance to Catholic Cathechists and that they may be used to evangelize those skeptics who have been produced and are being produced by the Public School systems.
One more thing, I don't believe these answers contradict Catholic Teaching. But if I discover that they do, I'll be the first to drop them.
THE BIG BANG VS BIBLICAL CREATION
Question: Doesn't the Big Bang contradict the Biblical account of creation?
Answer: No. All we need add to the Scientific account is the Prime Mover, the Creator who caused the Big Bang in the first place. Science may have postulated a big bang and found some evidence of the expansion of space, but without God as the explanation for the occurence in the first place they have nothing. Because nothing from nothing is nothing.
Perhaps an example might help. If you found a watch on the floor, would you assume the watch had miraculously made itself? Or would you assume that someone had made it? The universe is far more intricate than a mere watch, some intelligence had to make it.
Question: Science tells us that the stars and planets were made first but the Bible says that the earth was made first. Which is right?
Answer: The Bible does not say that the earth was made first. Please read Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....."
Note that God made the heavens first then the earth. It is concise language, full of meaning and science agrees with this order of events.
Question: How could the earth and the universe have been made in 7 days?
Answer: Scripture does say that the universe and the earth were made in 7 days. But, the 7 day arrangement is a literary device used by the author to more effectively convey the ideas being expressed. It allows the author to single out what he wants to discuss in an orderly fashion. It allows the reader to focus on one thing at a time. It allows our minds to visualize something unknown by using something known.
Answer: To this day the surface of Venus is dark. It is covered with clouds. The earth was then much like Venus is today, "formless and empty".
Question: Even if I believe that, you must admit that the day by day sequence of events is out of order. According to science, the land was populated last not first.
Answer: The Bible says: And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters....Genesis 1:2
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) paragraph 703 says:
It belongs to the Holy Spirit to rule, sanctify, and animate creation, for he is God...
That means that the Holy Spirit is the animator, principle of life and the Holy Spirit was already over the waters from the beginning before the first day.
Question: But the Bible says that the land was populated with life first (Genesis 1:11).
Answer: If the Spirit of God, the Principle of Life, was over the waters first (Genesis 1:2), we can assume that life was in the waters first and then spread to the earth in response to God's call. God didn't say, "Let the land have life" on the first day, He said, "Let the earth bring forth grass....". And this makes complete sense because the life bearing waters had just been drained from the land, leaving there, in my opinion, the seeds of life.
Question: But look at day 3, He just now made the sun and the moon.
Answer: If I make my child get up in the morning, I don't literally bring him into existence at that time. I simply order my pre-existing child to get up.
God made the sun, moon and stars when He made the Heavens (Genesis 1:1). God ordered the pre-existing sun, moon and stars to give light and mark the times (Genesis 1:17). This can be understood as some sort of covering being removed from the earth and light penetrated to its surface for the first time.
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When I was a (very brainwashed) teenager at a strict Baptist high school, an Episcopal friend who had a doctor for a father blew my mind by saying there are two creation stories, one right after the other. We had never paid attention to the other one (the second one) or wondered what literary devices the writer might be employing by having two seemingly contradictory stories. Hint: maybe the point isn't what we think it is, and maybe the ancient writer didn't think like a post-Enlightenment Westerner. (I ended up marrying that crazy Episcopalian guy and learning about evolution after all. Funny how life works).
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm lucky.I never had this conflict. Not sure why. Always saw the Bible from a larger anthropogical view
ReplyDeleteSo annoyed how text from the Bible are made internet memes to mock it.. Completely just pulling things out of a complete context.
EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH:
ReplyDeleteCarbon
What do hard sparkling diamonds and dull soft pencil ‘lead’ have in common? They are both forms (allotropes) of carbon. Most carbon atoms are 12 times heavier than hydrogen (12C), about one in 100 is 13 times heavier (13C), and one in a trillion (1012) is 14 times heavier (14C). Of these different types (isotopes) of carbon, 14C is called radiocarbon, because it is radioactive—it breaks down over time.
Radiocarbon dating
wikimedia commonsHopeDiamond
The famous Hope Diamond which was found about four centuries ago.
Some try to measure age by how much 14C has decayed. Many people think that radiocarbon dating proves billions of years.1 But evolutionists know it can’t, because 14C decays too fast. Its half-life (t½) is only 5,730 years—that is, every 5,730 years, half of it decays away. After two half lives, a quarter is left; after three half lives, only an eighth; after 10 half lives, less than a thousandth is left.2 In fact, a lump of 14C as massive as the earth would have all decayed in less than a million years.3
So if samples were really over a million years old, there would be no radiocarbon left. But this is not what we find, even with very sensitive 14C detectors.4
Diamonds
Diamond is the hardest substance known, so its interior should be very resistant to contamination. Diamond requires very high pressure to form—pressure found naturally on earth only deep below the surface. Thus they probably formed at a depth of 100–200 km. Geologists believe that the ones we find must have been transported supersonically5 to the surface, in extremely violent eruptions through volcanic pipes. Some are found in these pipes, such as kimberlites, while other diamonds were liberated by water erosion and deposited elsewhere (called alluvial diamonds). According to evolutionists, the diamonds formed about 1–3 billion years ago.5
Dating diamonds
Geophysicist Dr John Baumgardner, part of the RATE research group,6 investigated 14C in a number of diamonds.7 There should be no 14C at all if they really were over a billion years old, yet the radiocarbon lab reported that there was over 10 times the detection limit. Thus they had a radiocarbon ‘age’ far less than a million years! Dr Baumgardner repeated this with six more alluvial diamonds from Namibia, and these had even more radiocarbon.
The presence of radiocarbon in these diamonds where there should be none is thus sparkling evidence for a ‘young’ world, as the Bible records.
Objections (technical) and answers
The 14C readings in the diamonds are the result of background radiation in the detector. This shows that the objector doesn’t even understand the method. AMS doesn’t measure radiation but counts atoms. It was the obsolete scintillation method that counted only decaying atoms, so was far less sensitive. In any case, the mean of the 14C/C ratios in Dr Baumgardner’s diamonds was close to 0.12±0.01 pMC, well above that of the lab’s background of purified natural gas (0.08 pMC).
The 14C was produced by U-fission (actually it’s cluster decay of radium isotopes that are in the uranium decay chain). This was an excuse proposed for 14C in coal, also analysed in Dr Baumgardner’s paper, but not possible for diamonds. But to explain the observed 14C, then the coal would have to contain 99% uranium, so colloquial parlance would term the sample ‘uranium’ rather than ‘coal’.1
EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH:
ReplyDeleteThe 14C was produced by neutron capture by 14N impurities in the diamonds. But this would generate less than one ten-thousandth of the measured amount even in best case scenarios of normal decay. And as Dr Paul Giem points out:
‘One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples. But the number of neutrons required must be over a million times more than those found today, for at least 6,000 years; and every 5,730 years that we put the neutron shower back doubles the number of neutrons required. Every time we halve the duration of the neutron shower we roughly double its required intensity. Eventually the problem becomes insurmountable. In addition, since nitrogen creates carbon-14 from neutrons 110,000 times more easily than does carbon-13, a sample with 0.000 0091% nitrogen should have twice the carbon-14 content of a sample without any nitrogen. If neutron capture is a significant source of carbon-14 in a given sample, radiocarbon dates should vary wildly with the nitrogen content of the sample. I know of no such data. Perhaps this effect should be looked for by anyone seriously proposing that significant quantities of carbon-14 were produced by nuclear synthesis in situ.’2
Also, if atmospheric contamination were responsible, the entire carbon content would have to be exchanged every million years or so. But if this were occurring, we would expect huge variations in radiocarbon dates with porosity and thickness, which would also render the method useless.1 Dr Baumgardner thus first thought that the 14C must have been there right from the beginning. But if nuclear decay were accelerated, say a recent episode of 500 million years worth, it could explain some of the observed amounts. Indeed, his RATE colleagues have shown good evidence for accelerated decay in the past, which would invalidate radiometric dating.
The 14C ‘dates’ for the diamonds of 55,700 years were still much older than the biblical timescale. This misses the point: we are not claiming that this ‘date’ is the actual age; rather, if the earth were just a million years old, let alone 4.6 billion years old, there should be no 14C at all! Another point is that the 55,700 years is based on an assumed 14C level in the atmosphere. Since no one, creationist or evolutionist, thinks there has been an exchange of carbon in the diamond with the atmosphere, using the standard formula for 14C dating to work out the age of a diamond is meaningless. Also, 14C dating assumes that the 14C/C ratio has been constant. But the Flood must have buried huge numbers of carbon-containing living creatures, and some of them likely formed today’s coal, oil, natural gas and some of today’s fossil-containing limestone. Studies of the ancient biosphere indicate that there was several hundred times as much carbon in the past, so the 14C/C ratio would have been several hundred times smaller. This would explain the observed small amounts of 14C found in ‘old’ samples that were likely buried in the Flood.
Reference
Rotta, R.B., Evolutionary explanations for anomalous radiocarbon in coal? CRSQ 41(2):104–112, September 2004. 14C in coal was reported by: Baumgardner, J., Humphreys, D., Snelling, A. and Austin, S., The Enigma of the Ubiquity of 14C in Organic Samples Older Than 100 ka, Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 84(46), Fall Meeting Suppl., Abstract V32C-1045, 2003. And also: Lowe, D., Problems associated with the use of coal as a source of 14C free background material, Radiocarbon 31:117–120, 1989.
Giem, P., Carbon-14 content of fossil carbon, Origins 51:6–30 (2001), grisda.org.
EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH
ReplyDeleteReferences and notes
For example, the ‘Rev.’ Barry Lynn, leader of the anti-Christian group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, proclaimed in a nationally televised debate, ‘Carbon dating, that shows the earth is billions of years old!’ (Firing Line, PBS, 19 December 1997). Return to text.
The time t since radioactive decay commenced can be given by N/N0 = e–λt, where N is the number of atoms measured in the present; N0 is the initial number; λ, the decay constant, which is related to the half life t½ by λ = ln2/t½. This presupposes that the system is closed, so that the loss of atoms is solely by decay, and that the decay rate is constant. See also Sarfati, J., Refuting Compromise, ch. 12, Master Books, Arkansas, USA, 2004. Return to text.
The earth’s mass is 6x1027 g; equivalent to 4.3x1026 moles of 14C. Each mole contains Avogadro’s number (NA = 6.022x1023) of atoms. It takes only 167 halvings to get down to a single atom (log2(4.3x1026 mol x 6.022x1023 mol–1) = log10(2.58x1050) / log102), and 167 half-lives is well under a million years. Return to text.
AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) counts the atoms themselves, and can detect one 14C in more than 1016 atoms, or measure a 14C/C ratio of <10–16 or 0.01% of the modern ratio (0.01 pMC, percent modern carbon). Return to text.
Otherwise the diamond would anneal into graphite, so-called pencil ‘lead’. See Snelling, A., Diamonds—evidence of explosive geological processes, Creation 16(1):42–45, 1993; cf. Diamond Science, diamondwholesalecorporation.com, accessed 22 May 2006. Return to text.
Vardiman, L., Snelling, A. and Chaffin, E., Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol. II, ch. 8, Institute for Creation Research, California, USA, 2005. Dr Baumgardner also investigated many coal samples, and they also turned out to have 14C. Return to text.
Baumgardner, J., 14C evidence for a recent global flood and a young earth; in ref. 6, ch. 8. See also his paper at globalflood.org: Measurable 14C in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model, 5th International Conference on Creationism, 2003. Return to text.
https://creation.com/diamonds-a-creationists-best-friend