More on Rachel Oates' Take - a k a "No, Rachel"

The Bible's Case for a Young Earth in 'Genesis as History'
Rachel Oates | added / Ajoutée le 3 oct. 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt-eDe2XK9s

Linking to:

Young Earth v. Old Earth: What Does the Bible Say?
Genesis Apologetics | added / Ajoutée le 21 juin 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzEzkrMdgIs

Which I have not yet seen when making these comments.

I

0:42 The question was "does the Bible really say God created the world in six days six thousand years ago", not "did God etc".

What you consider as "evidence" available to most people would mean no to that other question, not to the question about what the Bible says.

II

2:48 Literal historical - life was created in its current form ... well, we who believe in this also believe quite a few dinosaurs and pelycosaurs were created then (whatever of this is not a genetic experiment in Nodian civilisation gone wrong), and we are not sure all of the major kinds survive to well after the Flood.

Like, Dimetrodon grandis could have been more than one of the legendary dragons (the sail being mistaken for bat wings from the side from a distance), but as for the Stego ... OK, there is the relief sculpture in Angkor ... and the classics would be Therapods and Sauropods surviving as possible Leviathan (there are other identifications) as well as probable Behemoth, Ceratopsians known as Unicorns, Pterosaurs known to Amerinindians as Thunderbirds, and some generations of Plesiosaurs sighted in Loch Ness.

But others could be gone. So, perhaps not quite the present form, if you count a fauna with the dodo as distinct from the present one after 1700 AD. Also, some invertebrates could have been much bigger before the Flood.

III

3:20 No, the period of time it occurs over is not the only difference. That is supposed to be a cause of another difference, for instance on how disparate creatures it unites.

Dog and wolf, cat and lynx, sheep and goat being originally same kind is really not a problem. But cat and dog having a common ancestry with each other or with certain hairy cattle, that would be "macro-evolution".

You still keep up the habit of talking down to creationists beind their back. While progressive creationists are wrong on time periods, they do have a point that non-bacterial life has too long generations to get enough generations for macroevolution, as assessed by Lenski experiment with e. coli remaining basically e. coli over 20 000 generations, by now.

IV

4:44 "these aren't like accurate reliable records of people who actually lived"

Why not?

Except it is against your world view, and limited to arguments one can use in history, why not?

If you don't accept the genealogy from Adam to Noah in Genesis 5, how much do you reject of the genealogy from Noah to Abraham in Genesis 11 (second half of chapter)?

Are you denying historicity of Abraham too? Suppose you reject all from Adam to Abraham in 1 Paralipomenon 1 or 1 Chronicles 1, are you denying the rest down to Jacob Israel too?

If so, when do you start confiding in the genealogy of next chapter, leading to King David in verse 14?

If you scrap all of that ... do you believe there was a Kunta Kinte, or did Alex Hayley make him up?

If you believe there was a Kunta Kinte, do you do so only because he has been found in records other than Alex Hayley's family tradition? If those records had been lost, would you have considered Kunta Kinte a fictitious name and character (note, Hayley is a novelist and he does some embroidering well beyond what any Biblical author would permit : in the sense of padding, I mean)?

Do you consider the genealogies from King David to Jesus in Matthew and Luke as mythical?

All Jews who are keeping record of what rabbis (and others) have a good claim to descent from King David - are they tracking an extant ancestry, like Charlemagne or Genghis Khan, or are they tracking a fictitious one, like "descended from Elendil and Elros son of Earendil"?

How many people do you see, these days, trying to track ancestry from Aragorn?

4:52 "These aren't official documents, they aren't taken from a census or birth certificates."

Yeah, right.

Alex Hayley knew his family history without these, even if he tracked some [or all] after.

Now, what exactly makes an official document so special when it comes to reliability?

No private person can have faked them? Depends on how influential he is. While my birth certificate was handled by Husie parish, it said, as did my passports, birth place Vienna, administrational birth place (where ma was registered resident at my birth), Södertälge. Now this has been simplified to Södertälge in the secular authority which took over birth certificates a little more than a decade ago.

Some private person was influential enough to fake them? Or some official was impatient and said "why bother with two birth places?" Either way, the present birth certificate is not reliable, and it is an official document.

Now, even so, you would say most official birth certificates are not faked in any way shape or form (and my present one, as far as I know from last time I bought a passport, is only faked on that issue), so generally speaking they are reliable.

Well, generally speaking a well memorised family history is also reliable. It can be faked too. Key word too. Most often it isn't.

England where you live has registrars of some sort making official documents. Not sure whether it's still Church of England or whether they are civil. But since under modern living conditions most families would forget their family history rapidly, over industrialism and getting sacked there and getting a new job here, over divorce and remarriage, over not being around parents very long, and so on, the official documents are generally speaking more reliable than family histories.

They are on par with top class of family histories.

But, the point is, family histories exist, some of them are good, and some of them are on par with official records. And, here is the point : Biblical genealogies are actually claiming for the texts as a whole that the texts as a whole were written by people with very good family records.

4:55 "or anything else like that"

Yes, family history definitely is something comparable to that.

5:01 "they are just characters in a book which could very easily be fiction"

No. For the very simple reason, we don't have any record of any community of people inheriting these stories starting out as taking them as fiction and then suddenly from nowhere starting to take them as history.

For one more thing, fiction has an artistic point. Family history is boring enough to be there only because it happened. And much of these genealogies are dry names, with no recorded events apart from getting born and handing on life to the next person - less than I know about great-great-grandfather who came to Malmö from Christianstad. I know he moved and I know he was a goldsmith (master, I believe), while his son, my great-grand-father only made it to goldsmith journeyman.

5:23 "no records of people living that long, except in the Bible"

Someone mentioned Sumerian King list, and I'll add "mythical Pharaos".

These guys live more than ten times longer than pre-Flood patriarchs in the Bible - suggesting that they are an exaggeration of those lifespans, which were obviously impressive to later comers.

If you on the other hand would argue, the Hebrew, Sumerian and Egyptian examples are all myths, nothing but, how do you explain that Hebrew version was modestly taking down lifespans to less than 1000 years in each single case? Lifespans on earth that is, Henoch and Elijah are by now of course having a lifespan of 5000-6000 and of 2800 years. Whereever they are. Plus lifespans under suspended animation in Avalon and things.

V

5:31 "again, we cannot use the Bible as evidence of the Bible"

I heard that one a lot after already explaining I was using "parts of the Bible" as evidence about other "parts of the Bible" to my atheist schoolmates.

Is it still very current?

You see, the question posed, as I recall it, was : "does the Bible really say God created the world in six days six thousand years ago" - i e, they are using the Bible as evidence for what the Bible actually says (also sth I did when accused of using Bible as evidence of Bible, I recall vaguely).

VI

6:07 You atheists cannot use genealogies to date earth.

We Christians can. Or have to.

Have you heard the technical term "argumentum ad homines"?

It is not the fallacy "argumentum ad hominem". It is simply arguing to certain people from what they already accept but others don't accept. Using genealogies as proof the six days at least ended 6 - 7.5 ky ago (depending on text version and skill in counting), is not an argument valid to an atheist, but it is an argument valid to a Christian already in a general sense accepting Biblical inerrancy.

So, if we are wrong, this is one of the ways we are wrong, and an old earther would only be right on that one by being wrong in general and on top of that inconsistent. If we are right, we are right here too.

6:54 We got here through a series of events, that either happened or didn't happen?

Sure, but one of the problems is that different scientists give different accounts, interpretations, precisely, on what they find about this story in the "evidence" for it.

So, where is the big superiority over Christians?

+ How about getting that:

• day age
• progressive creationism (often combined)
• general metaphor
• theistic evolution (also often combined, esp among modernist "Catholics")
• huge gaps in genealogies
• and GAP THEORY between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2

are not anything like well based in the Bible, but are rather like ways of compromising between the Biblical view and your one?

7:09 Sure, anything either happened or it didn't.

But that doesn't mean "we either know it happened or know it didn't happen", since there are things we don't know.

You know, in logic previous to modern remake (the Venn diagrams), there used to be four combinations of quantity and quality between subject and predicate:

• all S are P
• some S are P
• no S are P
• some S are not P or better not all S are P.

What is the difference between "some S are P" and "some S are not P"?

Well, the difference is how we put it, which in turn in some cases depends on the mood, because you know the case very well, and know both some mammals that are poodles and some mammals that are not poodles.

But in other cases, in syllogisms, one part of that information is most relevant for the argument you are making.

And in still other cases, one part of the story is all you know.

"some S are P" is compatible with "all S are P" and with its negation (in such cases) "some S are not P".

"some S are not P" or "not all S are P" is compatible with "some S are P" and with its negation "no S are P".

In other words, logic may have gone up in clarity about what factual possibilities are by Venn diagrams, it has gone down in clarity about what we know and what we don't know, what is relevant and what is not relevant, and what things are compatible in themselves with two things that are incompatible with each other.

We know real life from stories and from arguing.

12:19 And yes, these two guys are right now talking about refuation of other view points held by peoples consdering themselves as Christians - what do you expect? That they should 24 / 24, 7 / 7, 31 / 31, 366 / 366 every leap year be only preoccupied with refuting YOUR views?

Like Hugh Ross, a progressive creationist should not debunk literal biblicism, only atheism, we should never debunk him, only atheism, because atheism is kind of only thing that matters?

12:39 "if you put ... Bible ... against actual evidence, peer reviewed science ... it is not going to hold up" you said?

I think it does. I think both of the men are aware of arguments making it work.

I also think, this is not what they need to be talking about 365/365.

13:47 "no, but seriously, they are just handing it to us"

No. They were not adressing you atheists. There are people other than atheists. There are people we disagree with less than with you atheists. Why should we always be adressing you atheists?

It's a bit like if some certain Muslims (who know I am a blogger) are asking me - in one way or the other - to always keep the Muslim point of view in sight.

No thanks, we don't want to go insane or apostatise.

If you keep a certain viewpoint not your own always before your eyes, you will either accept it, or go insane because of whatever is forcing you to keep it in mind : if you don't get around to it, you will want space and time to blissfully ignore it.

VII

7:25 Theoretically, God could have been shining that light from no created light source for one thousand years, between day 3 and day 4. But it doesn't make much sense, does it?

7:38 pollinating insects is a better argument.

7:58 The order in the creation story is perfect, but makes better sense if it is a short story. Like 168 hours, not 168 my. It is just that it doesn't fit with the order in your story.

8:06 Has it occurred to you that we all do this irrespective of what our basic assumptions are? Like, try to overcome difficulties in the application of them to this or that piece of brute fact, rather than change them in face of the first little hurdle?

Has it occurred to you that you seem to be doing it quite a lot with your take on genealogies?

Plus, by the fact that you don't get "this is what the Bible says and what we have to argue about (with atheists)" as "this is what the Bible says and what we have to argue about (with atheists)" but as "this is what the Bible says, and therefore dear atheists it is the truth", seems to argue yu might be making yourself a bit deaf and dumb to what Creationists are actually saying ... perhaps for some reason?

8:19 We know it's a ... plants could be without Sun for 24 hours?

No. Plants have survived on electric light in basements for more than 24 hours. In fact, in some basements of Amsterdam, marijuana hemp is surviving under lamplight 24/24 so as to get stronger doses of THC.

Saying plants absolutely need the Sun, whether for 24 hours or for 1000 years, is like saying the light God made on day 1 was less effective than the lamp light we make by electricity. Come on!

If you want to take the story in its terms, do so, one of them is that God is able to do things.

What did not sit well with me when a teen (and confronted with day age) was more like : (reconstructing without exact memory) if the Earth was created before the Sun, that would mean the Earth started to rotate around it (I was no Geocentric back then) only after a long time being stationary. I don't think I was too confortable either with God making Earth rotate around Sun on day four either, but it was at least a bit more conceivable, with a stationary Earth as a very short makeshift.

I think the day age people (esp involving millions of years) would need to consider why the Earth was stationary so long and only later (comparatively recently) started to rotate around Sun - except, they get around it by claiming the making of Sun and Moon would mean them "appearing on Earth" - which very clearly is not what the text says. Genesis 1:

[14] And God said: Let there be lights made in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: [15] To shine in the firmament of heaven, and to give light upon the earth. And it was so done.

[16] And God made two great lights: a greater light to rule the day; and a lesser light to rule the night: and the stars. [17] And he set them in the firmament of heaven to shine upon the earth. [18] And to rule the day and the night, and to divide the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. [19] And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

Now, "making" doesn't sound like "making visible", and "setting" sounds as if it wasn't there before, not as if it was there, but something was hiding it. If a fog is hiding a mountain, and the fog clears up, that means that the mountain was there and appeared, not that it came : and "set" seems to be active where "come" is passive or intransitive.

Yes, I know, this is interpreting a text, and you don't do that ... because you don't do history, only prehistory.

If you want to know how you and your possible siblings came to be born whereever you were born, you will need to interpret some birth or baptismal certificates, some of them in a somewhat older English or using administrative abbrevations that are out of use, I shouldn't wonder.

But the first attempt at interpreting a text should be the straightforward one!

8:29 In other words, you will agree there is no way Creation story describes a "natural process" like the Evolution you believe in and believe to be such a thing?

Thank you for that one, at least!

8:59 Good fiction always does have to make sense.

An author who doesn't succeed in making sense won't be a bestseller on the fantasy or the detective novel shelves.

It's reality which doesn't always have to make sense - to those involved.

A reader is fine if the characters are confused, but not if the author leaves himself too confused. Reality is the story where we are actual characters - just that the characters aren't fiction. And as in some stories where characters are kept confused - we are sometimes confused.

VIII

9:55 The professor is missing that the days of Creation begin in the morning, and only the sixth day ends already on evening, not morning next day - because Sabbath rest (OT, corresponds to Sunday rest now) obviously doesn't begin Saturday morning, but Friday evening, when the days work is done on Friday evening.

This would give a clue about the duation of Earth being empty and void in verse 2 : if God created light on Sunday morning 6 am, Jerusalem time, God can have created Heaven and Earth 12 hours earlier, for a duration corresponding to a night's sleep or a night watch.

10:10 Yes, the author - and to a Christian this is ultimately God - wanted to make it seem like 24 hour days.

Thank you!

To a Christian this is proof they were 24 hour days.

To someone considering the author to be only an ignorant and unknown man from c 3000 years back in time and lower in intelligence and knowledge (as if either of these were continually or even overall expanding, rather than going in cycles around a median value), it isn't. We know that. But these two guys were not talking to you, they were talking between them and to other Christians. (Insofar as Protestants are in any sense Christians, of course).

10:14 As I recall the structure of the book, the set up was:

• one chapter on why Bible is trustworthy
• one on what it says about these things
• a few more defending trustworthiness in face of the obvious conflict with what you call "modern science".

You are complaining why the second chapter is not doing the work of the first or the following ones.

IX

10:38 As far as both Bible and Modern Astronomy go, there are no biological or "intelligent biological" / "spiritual in flesh" populations on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and so on (reservation for possibility one of these might be serving as temporary home of Henoch and Elijah, of course).

This means, God's setting up days on Earth is a way to conduct humanity, at the very least : if Martians don't exist, He didn't have to bother about setting up anything similar about Mars days for Martians.

And if like me you are Geocentric, you might say that this extends to comic book and film populations of Tatooine, Galaxity and so on. If these places don't exist as inhabited places, God needed no measures for day conting on them.

10:52 "no we are not the centre of the universe"

Yes, we are.

[Technically not quite : the demons and souls in Hell are the centre of Earth, and therefore of the universe, see Dante's Inferno]

11:37 It is not a question about measuring time, it's a question of how and why time started to exist.

Plus, on a Christian view, day and night, week days, lunar months, solar years, sun being in this or that part of the zodiac, all of this was decided by God for our time keeping.

11:47 Yes, on a Christian view, before God created diverse measures for time, God created time itself too.

You know the hour flowers of Secundus Minutius Hora in Momo, not the hours and minutes on the wrist watches.

X

13:00 How many times did God write the ten commandments "in stone"?

Exodus mentions two times (or if it was Exodus and Deuteronomy). But a third time is mentioned when God uses a human finger which won't carve stone, because Bethlehem was not arrival of Kal El from Krypton. He writes them in sand. John chapter 8. In traditional exegesis, the guess about what He wrote is, each commandment, visible for the improvised lynching judge who had broken it, all ten of them.

Now, Rachel, I suppose you take this as fiction, but you must admit it is quite a plot twist of even fiction, that God becomes Man, that God uses omnipotence as His finger twice, and a human finger, no stronger than you expect from a carpenter, the third time.

Sand is, as you may know, very small pieces of stone - i e minerals, only cohesion of grains is different.

XI

14:12 - 14:16

"It's like seeing the same data over and over again and coming to completely different conclusions."

Yes, that is true.

"Like as atheists we see things as inconsistencies and stuff"

Do you? How interesting? Do you see it only in Christians, or in yourselves too, occasionally?

14:25 "it's all just a story"

You know, there was a time when I read War of Troy as a Greek "myth".

When reading Latin, I saw Aeneas coming from Troy started a story going over Romulus and Remus and involving Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Perseus of Macedonia beaten at Pydna (though I didn't read that far in Titus Livy).

Where does the fiction end and the literal history begin? Well, on your principle, what we consider known Roman history could as easily be fiction, it is also in Titus Livy.

But on the other hand, if Hannibal really did exist, and Romans really did make war against him, I suppose War of Troy was real too. Where Aeneas is "son of Venus" or Romulus and Remus "sons of Mars", I disagree about the Pagan interpretation of how these men came to be born, but I see no sense in disagreeing about the events.

Same with Bible : it is also part of a storyline which is continuing unbroken to present.

You try to pick out anything as fiction because it is a miracle, you are up against this was as believed by Israelites (Genesis) and Early Christians (Gospels) as Weems biography of George Washington by Americans of Boswell's Life of Doctor Johnson by Englishmen. Or Plato's and Xenophon's accounts of Socrates by Classic Athenian Greeks.

You try to accept it (or most of it, after six days and Flood) as history, even with some "superstitious" misunderstandings, you have a lot more to explain than I have with Aeneas, Romulus and Remus.

You could say "we have independent evidence for Romans beating Hannibal".

Not so sure, the Greeks who did write that were already under Roman rule - they are part of a common and converging Greco-Roman tradition : and this evidence also involves some alternative accounts about Aeneas (the most credible divergence from Classic account is Dido was later than Aeneas, they never met, Virgil did an anachronism, like Jewish legends about Abraham meeting Nimrod).

But like Polybius is part of same tradition as Roman one (he came to Rome as hostage after Pydna, and learned Roman history in Rome from Romans!), and still is "independent evidence", compared to Titus Livy, well, equally, different Bible book authors are independent evidence compared to each other for same events.

And like Greco-Roman tradition largely ignores Biblical events, so Bible is fairly quiet about Hannibal or Aeneas. OT Hebrew tradition and Greco-Roman ones had not yet converged : from where they converge, at Christ, on Calvary, on the title of a cross where the Latin version reads Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, the Latin version of accusation, this history continues as one through Church History and Medieval History to our days.

And those who know history know, in the actual sources there are lots of miracles.

Your side has one Richard Carrier giving an example of independent evidence (even though he doesn't see it as that) for same miracle : a Roman legion in the time of Marcus Aurelius is facing Marcomans in Bohemia across the Danube, and the Marcomans are beaten by weather and flooding of Danube, without one sword being even raised. The Christian version is : this legion was a legion of Christians, they prayed to God. The Pagan version is : an Egyptian magician or priest of Egyptian gods did magic. The official record is : this legion was since then known as Legio Fulminatrix.

There is no careful sifting which will show miracles as ill founded and non-miraculous events as well founded. The only sifting which will do that is a very biassed one, namely the sifting which is based on "miracles don't happen". If you don't buy that, you would normally accept Angels appeared at the city Mons, during the War of 1914-18. This is a bit too recent to say we have no recent examples of miracles.

But of course, perhaps World War I also is "just a story"?

It is at least part of the same general timeline of history which includes Moses and Aeneas.

14:41 "even if it seems impossible"

A six day creation does not seem impossible to a Christian.

Even the Christians who vehemently oppose it, claiming it would involve God being a liar deliberately planting evidence for millions of years and so on, if Christians admit God could as easily have created the world in six days or on one moment.

So, the real issue is not whether the events are possible in themselves, to a Christian, indeed, to anyone except an atheist or someone else having an opposing world view, like Buddhists also have that. The real issue is whether it is possible for this to be true and also for these other things to be true, like charcoal from Göbekli Tepe having roughly 25 % modern C14, which would be expected if C14 had decayed for two half lives, and two half lives exceeds the Biblical timeline.

Yes, it is possible for Biblical timeline to be true as well as the 25 % C14 in charcoal from a certain layer of Göbekli Tepe. But the chapter you are studying is not where the guy tells you how, it is in one of the next chapters.

15:08 "as we discovered evidence and learned about science, all conclusions changed"

Actually, "Christians" departing from both Christianity and the literal version were there before evidence was discovered. Hutton and Lyell did not start out as exemplar Bible believing Christians who were shaken out of their Biblical world view by looking at rocks. Their known biographies show, they were not Bible believers even before looking at the rocks.

I have heard a real blooper (or read on quora) about "everyone involved in the discoveries was Christian ... Darwin and Fitzroy". Darwin was perhaps apostasising then, under the influence of Lyell, but Fitzroy saw the same evidence as he did, and did not accept either millions of years or evolution. Lyell, as said, was already not a Bible believing one, before he looked at the rocks.

The change was not due to scientific evidence, but, as the old man in the video said, Enlightenment.

That is not a sheer story of purely new discoveries, it is a change of intellectual habits - still opposed by some of us as a bad one - and it was more on general arguments, than on arguments from evidence.

And the Enlightenment men, including Hume who gave you your view and Carrier his view on history and miracles, were mostly horribly bad historians, horribly ignorant about documented past. Honestly, even atheists (like my Latin professor Birger Bergh, who considered St Bridget as schizophrenic, but could not explain why everyone died when she had predicted they would die), if they know history, will not consider Enlightenement men as good historians. You know that the Council of Nicea officially decided the woman has a soul? Except it didn't - it was a local council in Gaul (later known as France, then part of a Francia also spanning parts of Germany and BeNeLux and Switzerland) where someone raised the question whether a woman could be called "homo".

In Classic Latin, "homo" means "man" - it can refer typically to an adult male, but basically it is like Americans and Foreigners like Russians say "human being". In Romance languages the cognate means, like Swedish or German "mann" = adult male. As the word means in modern American. And of course, while a woman can be adult and human, she cannot be male. So, could one call a woman "homo"? The answer was "yes, Jesus is called 'Son of Man'/'Filius Hominis' and He is Son of Virgin Mary, who was obviously a woman".

And it was not a formal decision, it was part of small talk during a pause, recorded not in an official record from the council, but by the historian or story teller Gregory of Tours, much later. This I came to learn, not from a very biassed Catholic, but from a Latin professor who is an atheist - or was last time I checked.

BUT in the Enlightenment, the word came around that "the Council of Nicea decided the woman has a soul" - that is how bad Enlightenment men were at history. I think you can find that canard in basically these words in Voltaire.

So, the operative change was not scientific evidence (Voltaire laughed at the suggestion fish bones had been found on mountain tops), but an intellectual fashion known as Enlightenment.

Yes, modern chemistry comes from back then, but so do lots of stupidities about history.

15:36 Speaking of being an adult, shouldn't you take responsibility for your old age by starting to get children with Dan?

If you rely on pension system functioning when you get old, you are irresponsible, for details, see this post:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Why Concerned if Non-Religious Rebel Against Genesis 1:28? (quora)
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2017/09/why-concerned-if-non-religious-rebel.html

The scary part about men wanting to take responsibility for their lives without God is, they are so bad at it.

I suppose Tower of Babel was Nimrod planning a three step rocket. But I also suppose the potential rocket fuel he knew about was Uranium, known since Mahabharata wars before the Flood, so, a three step rocket fuelled by Uranium would NOT have gotten humanity or select parts of it up to Heaven where God was, as he had hoped, it would only have blown most of mankind to radioactive ashes, after Flood waters had gracefully covered a previous nuke disaster.

Was he taking responsibility for his life? Yes. Was it scary? Yes, because those who wanted to stay out of the stupid responsibility taking, which would have been disastrous were being persecuted as shirkers.

When ONE group of men say "we want to take responsibility for our lives, without involving God or mythology", it means, some of them will actively, and many more of them passively, if given the chance, persecute Christians taking responsibility after God's law in a Christian way.

15:38 "and you shouldn't be allowed to just keep avoiding it"

I hear the words of a persecutor. In your own case, you may just be insufficiently sympathetic to those being persecuted, but the words you repeat are those of persecutors.

Christian children are forced to go to schools with no Creationism in science class, in your country. And, I know how this worked out in my pre-teens and teens. It means, the one Young Earth Creationist in class is persecuted by harrassment. It means, he is not allowed and his parents are not allowed to take him away from his harrassers. School compulsion, and absence of schools with Creationism, you know.

You have at least expressed some degree of sympathy for that persecution, which is ongoing.

16:37 No, the whole thing was not scripted. Some people know each other.

Some logics can predict each others' words, even if they aren't yours.

16:49 If Jesus was just a man, it is no big evidence if He referenced OT.

If Jesus was God, omniscient and truthful, no error and no lie, then it is a lot more of evidence.

Newsflash : you are forgetting what Christianity is about, aren't you?

18:04 No, Rachel, he doesn't mean he ignores charcoal from Göbekli Tepe has 1/4 as much C14 in relation to C12 as charcoal from a twig you burned afer picking it from the ground where it fell.

He means he has evidence from the Bible which involves that the right interpretation of that 1/4 is NOT it started out with roughly same C14 ratio and two half lives have passed since then.

I am very certain he would agree with me, the solution is, in the time of Göbekli Tepe, the atmosphere had sth like half of the present C14 to C12 ratio. In Younger Dryas, it had less than half, during Göbekli Tepe, from lowest layer to the level where it was deliberately covered in sand, atmosphere passed the half line, and just after GT, atmosphere had a bit more than half of present C14 ratio.

This as as good a fit for the 1/4 of modern carbon in charcoal from GT. And what scientists actually have is not the 1000 years from 11600 to 10600 years ago, what they have is that one of these levels gives 25 % modern carbon. The other a bit less or a bit more.

I think I have been saying "no Rachel" so many times over, the words could become as Classic as a certain "yes Virginia".

And, 18:08, no Rachel, "real science" is certainly not the only way in which you find out truth. There is such a thing as history, and there is such a thing as theology.

And, no Rachel, you do not, as per 18:22, trust objective evidence over story books every single time.

You believe Wellington and Blücher beat Napoleon at Waterloo? Well, that is not objective scientific material evidence, that is not something an archaeologist could prove from digging up Waterloo, it is story books.

Like this one:

Wikisource : Wellington's Waterloo dispatch to Lord Bathurst, 19 June (1815)
by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wellingon's_Waterloo_dispatch_to_Lord_Bathurst,_19_June_1815