I appreciate a good discussion, especially one in which actual knowledge is exchanged and in which the conclusion isn't "I'm right and you're ether evil or stupid," and in which honest representations of both sides can be had. Unfortunately Guy doesn't do a great job of any of the three 😕
Yeah I'm aware that no given theory has literally all the evidence, that i.e. Big Bang and Evolution don't have as definitive and obvious evidence as atheists like to claim, but the evidence is too great to simply discard them. And they're very far from slam dunks against the existence of God. If anything I find evidence for God in the theories. Not the maker of exceptions to law, but the provider of all law and complex ways they interact to do things we presently consider impossible.
I also consider that man is made in the image of God something to be considered in a way much deeper and more substantial than most Christians typically do, which their interpretation leaves one not with the idea that "image" or "children of God" are correct words, but more like the cringey way that crazy cat ladies claim their cats are like them or their cats are their children. No. Consider John's words, "Now we are the sons of God, but it does not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."
So when it comes to science, it's basically picking apart what the laws of God actually are and asking "why do we observe what we are observing?" and treating "because God made it that way" as a complete cop out until we find the underlying laws of God by which the phenomenon occurs -- and when it comes in conflict with scripture, the approach should not be "you must discard one or the other," but rather to seek answers about why they seem to conflict, without assuming that one or the other might be wrong.
For instance I recently heard an argument about the timeline of creation in seven days being compatible with a 4 billion year creation by considering relativity and the unique temporal perspective of God. I thought it was a fascinating argument. I'm not going to declare this the correct resolution, but I bring it up because it's a good example of actual reasoning to enable both perspectives to be true.
but I do challenge the OEC to explain the many difficulties in the theory
As well you and anyone who calls himself a scientist should.
I'm no fan of John Maynard Keynes, but I do like this quote from him: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
You and I have a very different understanding of that verse. You're pretty obsessed with the outward appearance of devotion and obsessed with enforcing specific marks of belief, but beyond avoidance of the most obvious and egregious sins there's not much to suggest that your inner life is actually godly, and you doubt the power of God to save anyone who might have a different interpretation than yourself.
If evolution were true, explain why atheists gravitate to it
Why would being true repel them? You act like an atheist would deny that the two of us are communicating in English, because it is true and atheists are allergic to any form of truth.
It is true that many atheists latch on hard to the furthest stretches of what evolution might imply (i.e. pure, unaided abiogenesis) because it allows them to bypass the largest claim for the existence of God (namely that if there is no God, then there is no universe).
But it is not true that just because many atheists latch on to it that it must be the opposite of the truth. Evolution is derived from observation of large amounts of data, which I know you haven't examined in any degree of honesty -- and by that I mean without having AnswersInGenesis at the ready. The only other conclusion if there is no evolution is that God is more like the Norse deity Loki than the Canaanite deity Jehovah, deliberately planting evidence of a lie just to make people disbelieve.
They support a design-centered model of descent with degradation, not ascent with innovation
Which means that trilobites must be the highest, purest forms of life and we're all just degraded trilobites.
Instant creation... sorted into layers with each layer having a different and unique set of fossils in it, to trick man into thinking that it was formed over time.
Everything about the instant creation hypothesis hinges on a single Hebrew word "bara" which only ever refers to creation in one place; elsewhere it refers to clearing and deforesting. Further, the B in Hebrew is often proclitic, adding "with pleasure" to the rest of the word -- making the correct way to see the word as "b'ra'a" which would mean "look down with pleasure on" consistent with the rest of the account in which each phase God sees that it is good.
Heck, if you go back and retranslate the whole account of creation without recognizing it and inserting your own beliefs, the whole thing looks more like a story of a bunch of shining people (yes, plural) coming down from a high mountain to reshape the lowlands and assemble creatures.
I'm not subscribing to that translation, but what I'm saying is that your own understanding of the Bible does not come from a plain reading of the Bible at all, but rather from a bunch of assumptions that you've inserted into it.
The origin of the idea of creation ex-nihilo is in a debate between a follower of Plato and a Christian. I don't know why the Christians cared so much about having the approval of the philosophers, but they screwed so much with their beliefs just to get approval that Paul wrote a lot to tell them to stop (and when Paul wasn't there to stop them anymore, guess what they turned the religion into?). Anyway, creation ex-nihilo was invented on the spot because the Greek argued that resurrection couldn't be a good thing because the flesh is corrupt, so the Christian made up on the spot that God will just make new flesh because he just creates everything from nothing. Creation ex-nihilo was never taught before then. They'd rather make up new doctrine in the absence of their apostles than deny the Greek premise of physical matter being inherently icky.
The issue isn't with belief in God. The issue is how they've allowed charlatan pastors to treat science like Harold Hill treats the new pool table in the billiards hall -- as a lightning rod to instill moral panic in the town and thus sell his fly-by-night services.
It's true that what we understand about star/ planet formation is still very much in a hypothesis phase, but it's not pure spitballing -- we do have quite a bit of data on star formation.
But just because numbers of interstellar objects aren't exactly what one particular model predicted doesn't mean that you roll back to a YEC model that doesn't actually make any predictions.
His point about numbers of interstellars is... well, pointless. They're really hard to see. Heck, it's only recently we're even seeing some of the stuff that's in our own solar system.
Long story short this guy is talking out of his ass and you're eating it up because he's saying (without real evidence) that it supports your view of a young earth.
Never heard of that. I get early measurement of light speed being sketchy and difficult, but lightspeed decay would require the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability of pure vacuum to be fundamentally variable... or require an entire fundamentally new theory of electromagnetism.
Yeah the entire construct is bullshit, a nice little hypothetical stopgap fudge factor of "we don't know why our measurements don't line up with our theory, but we'd rather have a placeholder than go back to the drawing board."
I have seen some interesting hypotheses and models that match observation and theory without dark energy bullshit, the most intriguing one being something so stupidly obvious it's unbelievable someone didn't think of it earlier -- if you set the universe as a rotating system rather than linearly expanding one, the measurements line up without any bullshit factors. But that's still very much a work in progress.