Jimmy Akin Pretty Good on the Other Subjects, Judging from Prior and Following, However YEC vs OEC ...

Young Earth Creationism vs Old Earth Creationism? Ask Me Anything
Jimmy Akin | 17 July 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv3QQPGo9Xs

8:10 What you just said was correct c. 100 years ago, or perhaps even a bit further back.

In your communion, there came out a so called CCC, where § 283 pretty much clinches modern research as correct, "which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man." and since it says just before that "many scientific studies" it arguably means the majority position of scientists.

That's a canonic change these last decades. But there is a difference between being old earther as Fr. Fulcran Vigouroux was and to be one as Swamidass is now.

To Fulcran Vigouroux, Adam and Eve were the unique progenitors of all men, not one couple out of 1000 or 10 000, and lived c. 7000 years ago (he favoured LXX over Vulgate in chronology, so do I). It's kind of less relevant that he could have accepted dinos as dying out 66 million years ago. Not irrelevant, but not amounting to anything like a major discrepancy from the faith.

That's pretty much what JW's do today. They ignore C14, so, a C14 date of 40 000 BP being really just before the Flood, where it occurs in the chronology, well, they don't realise this could only happen in a young atmosphere, before the equilibrial point between normal C14 production and C14 proportion and consequently decay mostly cancel each other out after some decades, sometimes after some centuries.

If you don't ignore C14, and if you accept and old universe, an old earth, if you accept 40 000 years in carbon date as implying 40 000 real years, you are suddenly in trouble.

Place Adam near the beginning or before it, you make Genesis 3 not transmittable, by oral historic transmission, and you make Adam being a farmer, like his son Cain, inaccurate.

Place Adam in 7000 BP, like 5500 to 4570 BC, as Fr. Fulcran would have done, but add human skeleta in 40 000 BP, you are suddenly in the domain of pre-Adamites, plus an insecurity if Pre-Columbian and Pre-van Diemen populations of Americas and Oceania could really at first contact have been descended from Adam. That's a very big no-no.

8:49 I agree Earth is older than dead dinos.

I don't agree we have any good reason to believe these are millions of years old.

Stratigraphy, ecology, radiometric, every one of these points, I have answers to. I'll share them if you are interested.

I'm happy you defend the right of both to argue their positions, but it seems the Archdiocese of Paris is in practise treating me as a dissenter, or, if not, due to inaccurately throwing doubt on YEC being my definite position, and writing, publishing on blogs and hopefully blog-to-book, my already chosen profession. Some may pretend the YEC articles they recently saw of me were a phase, I've been strict pro-Biblical chronology since 1999 or 2000 when reading City of God, and some may pretend writing is perhaps not what I really want to do, both ways they are ruining my capacity of getting paid as as writer for among other things YEC content.

9:08 100 years ago, a position on the six days was enough to be Old Earther. By then, Day-Age (strictly speaking) and Gap were already shown false by research, their compatibility hasn't improved since, as far as I know, and Fr. Eugène (?) Mangenot radically altered exegesis by pretending the six days were a freely chosen literary form, not falling under inspiration, at least as far as chronology is concerned.

But by now, an Old Earther would need a position on Adam and Cain as farmers and on genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11. Plus where the Flood fits in, if it wasn't global, and if it was, it accounts for dinosaur fossils and is therefore by itself an argument for Young Earth.

11:03 Literary structure argument suggests God as Creator and Providence is so radically different from good story-tellers, He wouldn't make the actual sequence of events coincide with a good story (the opposite view of what Tolkien had of the Gospels!).

The "days before the Sun" problem is dealt with in detail in De Genesi ad Litteram Libri XII, namely in book I.

It's available in Georges Pompidou library, so I spent some time looking at that.

Earth is round. From the absolute beginning, it was first enveloped on all sides by darkness. After "let there be light" it was then enveloped on all sides by light, provided without a light source.

After Genesis 1:4, Earth was enveloped in light on one side, and in darkness on the other side, and the limits started rotating, same speed as Sun would take later. The days are counted in the Time Zone of Jerusalem, which is where God created Adam (Eden was probably in Jordan, somewhere, or perhaps even started as far West as Jericho ... either way, it was taken off the earth before Israelite history starts).