Look, underneath the shaman's robes and the funny headdress, I'm about as Christian as they come.
Still, I can walk my own farm and see the effect that glaciers had. If you tell me the Earth is 4 billion or 14 billion years old, I'll listen. A lot of what God does takes time.
There is a hole in the ground at my salt lick. I've been pouring in bags of rock salt every year for the deer. The deer have created quite a crater, carrying of bits of soil in their gut. I was bored one day and tried to calculate how long it would take them to dig a cellar and how much salt it would take. My head started to hurt.
On the other hand, there's a cave on the shores of Lake Victoria-- a monstrous thing. It has no water running into it, so they know it wasn't formed like normal karst. They figure it was the elephants, for God-knows-how-long going to a huge salt lick. Given how fast it takes, those elephants have been working on it probably longer than there have been elephants.
Do I believe the Bible? Yes, and in the case of Genesis, I believe at some time primordial a bunch of sheep herders got the lowdown from on High in the terms they understood and did their best to remember it. I believe that Moses got the straight dope from God in the best terms he could understand. I believe that Christ came to the world and gave us the straight dope as best as we could understand. You can throw Paul in there. I think he was one of the best examples of how God sends folks out to explain things.
None of these revelations told me anything about how to fix a computer or reload for 30-06, and I don't rely on the Bible for this info as a result. I also don't take a sheep herder's word on things like Geology, Astronomy, or Cosmology.
Very well said.
Thanks. I have close family that hold to a young/flat earth based on purely Biblical interpretation. One merely has to go for a ride in a modern jet to see the curvature of the earth, but somehow that isn't good enough. I can take them to parts of their own county and show them formations that took hundreds of thousands of years to create, but they blame the Flood.
Years ago, I had a neighbor who came by to see what I was doing out in the driveway. I had my 8 inch Dobsonian out and I was observing the Andromeda Galaxy. He was fascinated. I offered him a peek, but he declined. He said his Bible was enough and didn't want to confuse things. This was a mid-level exec with MCI corp and was lead on the P&G account. Yikes.
Me? I used to sit on a cliff overlooking the Mill Creek in Cincinnati. It's an extension of the Licking River and in times past it ran the other way and eventually used to dump into the Ohio when it ran up the Little Miami, crossed over to the Great Miami well north of Cincinnati and ran down what is now the Great Miami. The below-ground aquifers are still there. To me the carving of river channels over thousands of years is a grand spectacle of God's influence in the world.
