As regular readers have noticed, the Christian worldview makes sense of what is seen in the world. Logic, science, mathematics, and other necessary but intangible things are impossible without God. It is often easy to dismantle spurious arguments from professing atheists, but Christians are called to a higher standard.
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| Deluge (II) by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, 1904 |
A professing Christian decided to slap leather with Dr. Jason Lisle regarding the lengths of the days before the Genesis Flood and why days are longer now. It did not go well. The challenger acted like an atheist in several ways by using logical fallacies, uninformed conjectures, exceeding what was written in the Bible — and lying. Dr. Lisle corrected him with Scripture, reason, and mathematics. This guy, like atheists, seemed to resent being kept on topic.
We here examine some assertions made by Troy, a young earth creationist who has made some very unorthodox claims about conditions before the Genesis flood. He believes that the length of a day was much shorter before the flood, only 18 to 20 hours per day, and that the flood somehow changed this. As errors go, this is a fairly mild one, and there is nothing heretical or theologically damaging about such a speculation. But the way in which Troy attempted to defend his conjectures involved serious errors in reasoning, in science, and in biblical interpretation. And these are the same kinds of errors that often lead to bad theology and even heresy. It is crucial that Christians “accurately handle the Word of Truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). And sometimes the best way to learn to reason properly, and to interpret the Scriptures correctly, is to see how someone else fails to do these things properly. Thus, by examining Troy’s many errors, we can become better thinkers, and more accurately handle the Word of Truth.
This continues in a pair of rather long articles. (You may want to see mine, "How to Deal with Long Posts and Videos".) What appears above is continued in "Faulty Speculations on the Pre-Flood World: Part 1", and there is another, "Faulty Speculations on the Pre-Flood World: Part 2".