Pat Robertson Says the Earth is Not 6,000 Years Old

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/2 ... 07275.html

Pat Robertson, the controversial televangelist and host of the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club," is said to have stunned many of his viewers on Tuesday when he dispelled the idea -- held dear by many Bibical creationists -- that Earth is only 6,000 years old.

He went on to say that Christians should not "cover up" scientific evidence that shows the Earth to be much, much older.

As Raw Story notes, Robertson's comments were made in response to a viewer who had written in to the show. The woman said that her "biggest fear is to not have my children and husband next to me in God's Kingdom because they question why the Bible could not explain the existence of dinosaurs."

In response, Robertson said:
Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop [James] Ussher wasn't inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn't. You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas.
They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible.

"If you fight science," he continued, "you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was."

In 1650, the Archbishop of Ireland James Ussher estimated that the Earth was created on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. Ussher's work continues to be cited by many creationists -- including the Christian group Answers in Genesis -- as evidence that the Earth is only thousands of years old.


In fact, "many Young Earth Creationists," writes the Christian Post, believe that dinosaurs lived alongside humans 6,000 years ago, before the "great flood" described in the Book of Genesis. Some Christians, however, reportedly "dispute the existence of dinosaurs altogether, claiming that bones excavated by scientists are a ruse meant to cause confusion among believers."

In an article entitled "What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?," Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum in Kentucky, wrote that the Bible can help explain the existence of the extinct animals, the Christian Post notes.

Ham claims not only that dinosaurs lived at the "same time as people," but were on Noah's famed ark when the great flood occurred. They eventually became extinct, he said, because of "post-Flood climatic change, lack of food, disease, and man's activities."

As Raw Story points out, however, Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network "promoted the Creation Museum in a 2007 report and seemed to buy in to the notion that the Earth was thousands -- not billions -- of years old."

Moreover, writes Right Wing Watch, the network also "sells material arguing that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the Bible says dinosaurs and humans lived together."

This is not the first time in recent months that Robertson has made headlines with his comments.

Earlier this month, Robertson warned his viewers that "miserable atheists" are trying to "steal" Christmas.

"Atheists don't like our happiness, they don't want you to be happy, they want you to be miserable," Robertson said at the time. "They're miserable so they want you to be miserable."

Also this month, the TV host expressed shock that some women watch porn, calling all pornography "boring."

I suppose this along with Robertson's support for marijuana legalization is somewhat encouraging although I suspect considering his previous comments on evolution he's an Old Earth creationist rather than a theistic evolutionist.

[Channel72]

Well, this is good news. A lot of Christian creationists watch CBN, and hopefully this forces them to at least reflect on their position somewhat. (Also, hopefully it turns out to be an example of the turncoat effect, discussed in this thread)

On the other hand, I'm not sure if Robertson really thought this through. The reason Creationist organizations fight so hard and put so much effort into denying mountains of evidence indicating a 4.3 billion year old Earth is not simply because "the Bible doesn't explain dinosaurs."

It's because the entire theology of the Bible is incongruent with an old Earth where violence and death existed long before the existence (and Fall) of Adam and Eve. The Redemption Theology associated with Christ's death and resurrection only really works if the world was perfect until Adam sinned. If Christian's allow for an Old Earth, they're basically admitting that God created an imperfect world with death and violence right from the beginning.

Also, an Old Earth really makes the idea of "special creation" particularly absurd. If we allow for the actual, scientific geological timeline, we end up with this bizarre scenario where God sat around twiddling his thumbs for billions of year, creating nothing but protozoa, and then suddenly around 500 million years ago he was like - "This is boring. Cambrian explosion!"

[ryacko]

http://etb-intelligent-design.blogspot. ... esign.html
Skip down to "Was the World Made for Man" to read the Mark Twain essay on this.

The funniest part:

Very well. According to Kelvin's figures it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him. But a large enterprise like this has to be conducted warily, painstakingly, logically. It was foreseen that man would have to have the oyster. Therefore the first preparation was made for the oyster. Very well, you cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster's ancestor first. This is not done in a day. You must make a vast variety of invertebrates, to start with -- belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them to soak in a primary sea, and wait and see what will happen. Some will be a disappointments - the belemnites, the ammonites and such; they will be failures, they will die out and become extinct, in the course of the 19,000,000 years covered by the experiment, but all is not lost, for the amalekites will fetch the home-stake; they will develop gradually into encrinites, and stalactites, and blatherskites, and one thing and another as the mighty ages creep on and the Archaean and the Cambrian Periods pile their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed, the Oyster is done.

[Lord Falcon]

Jesus Christ, I really have a hard time believing that some people are truly this dumb, that they believe the Earth was magically created in seven days and that its only 6,000 years old. That... is beyond stupidity. I know I occasionally skirt the line into stupid, but this is nuts. Where do most creationists live? Where's their base? Let me guess: The US, probably the US South too...

[Spoonist]

Where do most creationists live?

Please make the distinction between creationists and young earth creationists.

The majority of the human population on earth is ceationists, ie a divine power created existance as we know it.
Most creationists don't care or have not thought about if that makes creation young or not.

Let me take you down an example
Abrahimic religions are pretty much all creationist.
But Judaism doesn't normally believe in a young earth, because they have a concept of pragmaticism when reading scripture (ie saying the contradictory stuff is sayings & parables not actual divine truth). Since day and night requires there to be a heaven and earth plus a light and dark, then the measurement of a "day" doesn't exist until those things so it couldn't take an actual day to create something which.. uh.. you get the picture. Therefore they conclude that it isn't a literal day that passes but rather "a passage of time". So they can reconcile an old earth akin to a divine fastforward button, then nothing fun happened in, like, 100 million years or so = And the erev and the boker were Yom Shlishi (Day Three, the Third Day).
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=OJB

When it comes to christians its divided, the Holy See has come out and said that the evidence points to evolution existing and thus an old earth, but very many catholics don't agree.
When it comes to protestants and deviations in the US and south east asia then they are mostly young earth. But when it comes to protestants and deviations in europe they are mostly old earth.

Finally we come to muslims. here the age isn't the thing but rather evolution. All three major branches all say that evolution is wrong.
This means that the trend is currently very much going from an old earth (since the golden islamic age was first to suggest such etc) to whatever is anti-evolution including earth being youngish. As in some 100 000 years old.
But if you ask them most muslims would simple say that "since it's not in the Quaran it is not known or only for Allah to know", ie its up to god and since he didn't specify its not that important.

If you look at the diversity of human religions you'd have even more of a spectrum. We even have a few cyclic one with creation - existance - armageddon - chaos - creation, etc etc etc.

[Algebraist]

The amount of generally accepted science that needs to be denied by a Creationist depends on their exact beliefs:
A young earther needs to deny a huge amount - majority of geology, nearly all cosmology and related physics, not only evolution but a lot else in biology (eg in biology history you would have a lot of species living side by side that actually were millenia apart - either that or you deny they existed).

An old earther creationist may only be at odds with part of evolution. One version is that humans were created by God in his own image separately from the rest of the animal kingdom. This does require some "creative" reasoning however to explain early man and intermediate species between the early apes and early man.

You can of course believe that God created life any everything and that this is not ultimately disproved by scientific theories. Whereas of course when setting a scientific theory there is no place in the equations for God as a variable!

[Zwinmar]

Holy thread necro their genius: need a link to rules?