The Ugliest Fight in Christianity: Young Earth vs Old Earth
Theology With Seth | 6 April 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7p4QbPsTrY
Can we agree that carbon dating basically presupposes samples (exceptions excepted) started with around 100 pmC, because that's around what you would find in an old atmosphere?
In other words: if the Earth is billions of years old, a carbon date of 42 000 years means the Neanderthal died c. 40 000 BC.
Why would this be a problem? Well, Neanderthals had speech organs and language brain, so were created in the image of God. They died, so Adam had already sinned. If a Neanderthal died 42 000 years ago, Adam sinned way before 42 000 years ago.
However, this doesn't match the generations in Genesis 5 and 11 of generations between Adam and Abraham.
Say Abraham lived 4000 years ago, and 42 000 minus 4000 = 38 000. I reckon Abraham received oral tradition for Genesis 1 to 11, or if Genesis 1 was revealed to Moses, Genesis 2 to 11. And then started to put things down in writing. Genesis 5 and 11 would show the tradition actually faulty and the 38 000 years would make oral tradition make a joke of historicity. You also cannot appeal to a prophecy accurately revealing Genesis 1 to 11 in such a case, since Genesis 5 and 11 would show that prophecy inaccurate.
Again, if carbon dating needs to be "taken as given" (no reinterpretation by appealing to a lower initial pmC), Genesis 14 isn't historical. Why? Because in carbon dated 2000 BC there is no population in En-Gedi (Asason-Tamar in the text). Genesis 14 is only historical if events (or organic objects, living organisms) from 2000 BC-ish can carbon date to 3500 BC (end of chalcolithic of En-Gedi, according to archaeologists).
Again, same observation, you have Abraham in 2000 BC. In a LXX version, Peleg was born 541 years before Abraham, so 2541 BC. Carbon dated! You have nothing that resembles an abandoned Tower of Babel at this point and you already have a difference between Akkadians, Sumerians and Egyptians. However, if Abraham was born 2015 BC and Peleg 2556 BC, but the atmosphere had rising pmC, in 1935 BC, when Abraham is 80, it's so low things date to "3500 BC" (Amorrheans of Asason-Tamar), and when Peleg was born, it's so low it carbon dates to "8000 BC" (end of Göbekli Tepe, a good candidate for Nimrod's Babel).
2:52 4004 BC as per Ussher would be a pretty probable count on texts like, not just King James, but also Vulgate and Douay Rheims.
I think, even with the text choice, which isn't mine, he did a blooper about Thera dying physically before Abraham's vocation at age 75. In Acts 7, St. Stephen says And from thence, after his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein you now dwell.
Either this refers to a spiritual father, like Sarug not falling into idolatry at all and therefore suppling a "Christian" education when Nachor and Thera couldn't, or this refers to the spiritual death of Thera, like he didn't fall into idolatry long before his son was 75.
However, while he is now most famous, two people have a near equal fame. Both at least partially for one, used the LXX.
- St. Jerome did a calculation, using that of Julius Africanus for the time up to the birth of Abraham, where Genesis 5 spans 2262 years and Genesis 11 (genealogy) spans 942 years. It came into the Historia Scholastica and is now in the Roman Martyrology for Christmas day (St. Jerome however "corrected" the Genesis 5 span to 2242 years, following the most frequent LXX reading);
- George Syncellus (who had shared the monastic cell with Photius, hence the nickname) did one on the standard text of the LXX (Genesis 5 being 2242 years and Genesis 11 being 1070 years, with the second Cainan).
These give Christ born 5199 or 5500 after Creation. There are other choices than ex- or inclusion of II Cainan between them, though all three hold to a Short Soujourn.
3:06 There is a difference between a genealogy having an occasional gap, very probable in Matthew 1 but leaving out only 4 persons if so, with damnatio memoriae, and this could also be the case with the II Cainan if he belonged to the Genesis 11 line, with a Hebrew text leaving him out directly for a fault of his, but oral tradition supplying and then the translation to Greek involving the adding of him in the text, as Greeks didn't have the convention. Alternatively, he's a copyist mistake in Luke 3, having contaminated LXX copies of Genesis 11.
There is a difference between that kind of occasional gap and having a genealogy that's more gap than actual recorded generations. A huge difference.
3:17 Sometimes they only included the big names ... sorry, but you are taking an info that's not about ancient Jews as much as about ancient Babylonians. Archibald Sayce abusively pretended this was the case for Jews as well.
What's more, the inclusion of "he and he was so and so old when he engendered him and him" actually does at least strongly hint to a chronological purpose of the genealogies, one which would be foiled if only including "big names".
But if we played his game for a bit, what would we conclude?
Supposing we had regnal figures, leaving out children dying before parents (then Enoch would logically have been left out from Genesis 5!), there is only so much longer a hypothetic "complete" genealogy would be. If you count Bourbon Kings up to the French Revolution, it's Henry IV, Lewis XIII, Lewis XIV, Lewis XV and Lewis XVI. The actual generations involve two more people between Lewis XIV and Lewis XV and one more between Lewis XV and Lewis XVI. So, eight instead of five.
2262 * 8 / 5 = 3619
1070 * 8 / 5 = 1712
3619 + 1712 = 5331
(compare 2242 + 942 = 3184)
If Abraham was born 5331 after Adam's creation instead of 3184 after that event, that still doesn't put Adam earlier than a Neanderthal carbon dated to 42 000 BP.
Not to mention that to even have a chance of transmitting Genesis 3 over 38 or more millennia, you need to posit a Lost Civilisation, even apart from the Pre-Flood or Nodian one which YEC posit. If you say between Adam and Abraham most lived as hunter gatherers in small groups, which met chaotically and survived by hasards, you have basically given up the idea of historic transmission. And you have added heavy inaccuracies to Genesis 4, not just about Tubal Cain, but even about Adam and about Cain and Abel.
3:26 Yeah, you have shown 3 of the 4 gaps in a 40 plus long genealogy of Matthew 1.
All three descend from Athaliah, the one woman who has some irregularity (prostitute, gentile, adulteress) and isn't specifically mentioned in Matthew 1. That explains very well 3 out of the 4 gaps in Matthew 1.
A genealogy leaving out 10 % being possible doesn't mean that a genealogy only including 10 % is so too.
3:45 We actually can insist on tight chronology in Genesis 5 and 11, we are not free to invent gaps, since in Matthew 1, you don't have a chrono-genealogy the way those two ones are.
Neither Ussher nor the two others used Matthew 1 to calculate the timespan from King David to the Babylonian captivity.*
Were Adam & Eve Real or Metaphorical?
Theology With Seth | 4 May 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLfUnDhIWig
10:19 How do you know it's "heavily abbreviated"?
If Adam lived before a Neanderthal (he did), who died literally 42 000 years ago (according to the carbon date that presumes his bones started with c. 100 pmC), the Luke 3 genealogy or it's mirrors in Genesis 5 and 11, would not be "heavily abbreviated" they would be distortions into myth, thousands of years even before they reached Moses.
Young Earth vs Old Earth: How Long Were the Creation Days in Genesis 1?
Theology With Seth | 17 March 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uUiuyB5sZ4
26:46 In 1909, the Pontifical Biblical Commission declared that the Day Age view did not fall on the simple interpretation of yôm, and could be freely discussed among exegetes.
It merits to be said, Pope St. Pius X:
- allowed this decision to be signed by a Day Age proponent
- in the same year canonised St. Clemens Maria Hofbauer, whose personal doctor and friend, Veith, wrote a Young Earth (six literal days) manual.
A free discussion however involves the freedom to bring up arguments against.
The arguments from animal death before sin and from Mark 10:6 are, canonically speaking, wavered. You can bring them up, you cannot claim they are right now directloy stamping an old earther as heretic. However there is no provision in that judgement (contrary to prior statements from the judge in the PBC) for saying "Adam lived 100 000 years ago" or "Genesis 5 and 11 are not literal, patrilinear, normally gap free, genealogies" or "the story of Genesis 3 wasn't transmitted from Adam to Moses by the people in the genealogies" ... none of that was provided for, and none of that was remotely needed before carbon dating, before the understanding that an old atmosphere means the carbon 14 content has been c. 100 pmC for long and before finding men dated to 42 000 years ago. Not just Neanderthals by the way, in case you felt inclined to deny their humanity, which you shouldn't. "Homo sapiens reached the higher latitudes of Europe by 45,000 years ago" is a paper by Dorothea Mylopotamitaki, et al. from Jan 2024. The paper mentions Homo sapiens bones and carbon dates.
If you accept non-carbon dating methods, which old earthers typically do, you'll have the divergence between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sapiens races going back some 100 000 * n years before this. Concentrating on Genesis 1 without bringing up the length of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 (and Luke 3) or carbon dates, is putting the discussion into a vacuum artificially put 100 years back into the story of human erudition and recent discussions.
Notes:
* For any Catholic reading this. 1909, Pontifical Biblical Commission, only allowed for Day Age theory, not for an indefinite number of gaps in Genesis 5 and 11. Archibald Sayce abusively transferred observations of Assyriology to Bible studies and any Catholic authority citing his work is only diocesanly approved manuals. In the USA, these have coexisted with Baltimore Catechism and Haydock Comment, both of which encourage a more literal view of Genesis 5 and 11. You cannot say "Day Age is a canonically licit licence about Biblical chronology, therefore so is 'gapped genealogies' " since that was not included in the 1909 decision. Significantly, the judge, Fulcran Vigouroux, had promoted both gapped genealogies (as a possibility, not yet necessity) and non-global Flood in his own 1888 textbook of OT theology, a diocesan manual for Paris. This, unlike Day Age, Pope Pius X didn't give him opportunity to confirm as judge in the PBC.
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