"Inspiring Philosophy" pretends to trace YEC to Ellen White

Creation vs. Evolution: Is It Christianity at All? · New blog on the kid: "Inspiring Philosophy" pretends to trace YEC to Ellen White ·Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Dr Joel Edmund Anderson - a Fraud or a Dupe? · Magisterium and Polygenism · An Unexpected Turn

It's a rehash of others making the claim earlier, it doesn't become better bc of his rehash, except it's a commodeously short piece to comment on in a single listen. Hence good for my refutation purposes.

This kind of article, I usually publish on:
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/

Here is his video, anyway, and after that my comments are marked for context in it with time-stamps.

The Origins of Young Earth Creationism
InspiringPhilosophy, 7 Jan. 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcNTAi0Cw4

0:28 I don't think any of the guys you show believed the earth was more than 6000 years when Our Lord was born.

St. Augustine very clearly holds to the literal interpretation of Genesis 5 and 11, as evidenced in his City of God. This precludes expanding the span between Adam and Abraham to even 4000 years.

He also at least tentatively held that Adam was not created within 168 hours, but rather the same split second hat the whole of the universe was created, as he is discussing in books V and VI in On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, XII Books. This precludes expanding time before Adam to anything like millions of years.

Xavier Putnam

Yeah; IP's video is a train-wreck of academic sloppiness and dishonesty. You've posted some great rebuttals with timestamps; thank you!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Xavier Putnam You are welcome.
Search nov9blogg9 + "Inspiring Philosophy" pretends to trace YEC to Ellen White
They are also available as a single blogpost. Hope the search will function.

@Xavier Putnam New blog on the kid : "Inspiring Philosophy" pretends to trace YEC to Ellen White
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2023/03/inspiring-philosophy-pretends-to-trace.html

0:31 "interpreted Genesis figuratively or allegorically"

Were you asleep in the Theology class explaining Quadriga of Cassian?

As about Genesis events, they interpreted the text literally. They did however also interpret it figuratively or allegorically about Jesus Christ, like Isaac carrying the firewood is ultimately about Jesus carrying the cross.

0:40 You may be shocked to find that that particular modern Young Earth movement has a parallel in Catholic theologians.

From Lyell to the 1890's there were Catholic theologians publishing three possibilities.

Not just gap theory, not just day-age theory, whichever of them you might have accepted, but precisely young earth creationism and Flood Geology.

The reason that Flood Geology and with it YEC was by and large abandoned as a mediatic concern of new publications, i e as a movement, is, "Pyrenees are older than Himalayas and even Pyrenees are too high to have been covered by Flood waters considering today's water volumes" ... sth which the modern (and mostly Protestant) YEC movement have found technical answers too, like "no Pyrenees didn't rise the same way much longer ago, then get worn, they rose a different way, also after the Flood" ..

1:40 I would say 7222 years old.

The LXX reading available to St. Jerome when he made the calculation that is then, via Historia Scholastica, now included in the Christmas Proclamation. The martyrology reading for December 25th. Our Lord was born in 5199 after Creation.

1:47 And, yes this actually is how Christians read the Bible.

2:34 St. Augustine didn't read the creation days literally. But his non-literal interpretation (on his view actually a literal one, with a very specific view on what day means in the context) certainly did not allow for Earth to be even a year, let alone millions of years older, than Adam's creation.

Wonder what you'll take up for "more than 10 000 years" - if it's Origen, he specified "less than" ...

3:06 Days in Genesis 1 are a different context from "day" in Genesis 2:17.

I looked up St. Irenaeus, he certainly doesn't apply the "day as thousand years" solution perfectly solid for 2:17 as similar to the Creation days.

The exegetic cherry-picking by which an exegesis from a different context may help you with a word for the context you find a word irksome is unhappily replicated in Zwingli, when he considered "the seven cows are years" as exegetic licence to argue the Eucharist is symbolic.

Cherry-picking an exegesis for Genesis 2:17 and misapplying it to Genesis 1 is the same damnable thing.

3:19 The quote you give "the days in Genesis are not literal 24-hour days" simply is not in Against Heresies 5.23.2. What comes closest to it is this:

"And there are some, again, who relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since a day of the Lord is as a thousand years, 2 Peter 3:8 he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them, thus bearing out the sentence of his sin."

The quote II Peter 3:8 is perfectly applicable to Genesis 2:17, and that's one of the versions given for solving the conundrum, but St. Irenaeus doesn't even pinpoint it is THE sole solution - his other solutions are:

• Adam and Eve died spiritually
• Adam and Eve died on a Friday as they ate of it on a Friday

But nowhere is there any hint of II Peter 3:8 being applicable to days of Genesis 1.

3:45 "For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years it shall be concluded"

Very far from stating that the days of Genesis 1 as applying to creation could be thousands of years, he said the opposite. He establishes a proportionality between creation days and history-millennia, the latter being between creation and doomsday.

Proportionality is not identity. Again, no bearing on how long it took for God to create the world, other than that being a series of normal length days.

The heading of (Book V, Chapter 28) is "The distinction to be made between the righteous and the wicked. The future apostasy in the time of Antichrist, and the end of the world."

4:25 No, on Irenaeus' view, the earth was between 4 and 6 thousand years, when Christ came (probably some more precise thing too, like 5500 or 5200), and that means there were on his views centuries left before the world was going to end. (Like 500 AD or 800 AD = 6000 after Creation = doomsday).

Technically speaking he very well qualified as a YEC.

Learn to read before you try to take his expressed views as indirect endorsements for your own!

4:43 St. Ireneaeus very much thought one should interpret the days of Genesis 1 as literal 24 hour days.

LEARN TO READ

And then reread Against Heresies (Book V, Chapter 28) and all of the chapter, not just the passage you misunderstood!

5:15 Indeed, the time for creation is, in a minority of fathers, one moment.

Clement, Origen, Augustine.

However, this doesn't mean they throw out literality of interpretation, it's just that a literally true text can include figurative expressions, and in St Augustine's version, which I read a few years ago, books V and VI of De Genesi ad Litteram Libri XII, the literality lies in the fact that Moses got the vision from angels, and the angels saw the single creation event as six consecutive visions of it or views of it, and the six "days" refer to those views and "evening and morning" refer to angels first seeing the created things in themself (evening) and then looking up and seeing them in God (morning).

Obviously this does not extend the time before Adam beyond 168 hours, but reduces it to zero seconds.

OK, didn't know St. Athanasius also was one moment, but OK.

Now, these guys weren't six-literal-days creationists, but they were still Young Earth Creationists.

In St. Augustine you will find he finds the six-literal days view acceptable.

6:01 Did you notice that the God divided days (in St. Augustine) were such because God decided where the light before the Sun shone?

This is apparent if you read the beginning of the work from book I.

6:36 Note here, St. Augustine bases the "one moment view" on Sirach 18:1.

In the translation of St. Jerome it reads Qui vivet in aeternum creavit omnia simul. Deus solus justificabitur, et manet invictus rex in aeternum.

However, "together" would have been "iunctim" in Classical Latin, and St. Augustine ordered him to be colloquial, not Classic. St. Jerome was from a region where "together" was reusing "simul" or even more often "insimul" ...

And in St. Augustine's colloquial, "created all things together" would have been "creavit omnia iuncta" (North African Latin being related to Spanish, where you find "juntos" and "juntas").

St. Augustine therefore interpreted "simul" in the fully Classical sense of "simultaneously" ...

6:51 St. Augustine believed the days were views, made by the angels, of the work of creation.

And therefore also, that it was more than just a narrative framework.

7:15 Oh, you are repeating the overanalysis by Father Fulcran Vigouroux.

The thing is, arriving at age of the earth involves not extending Genesis 1 beyond 168 hours, which strict literalism doesn't and which one moment creationists also didn't. But above all, it involves taking genealogies from Adam to Noah and from Shem to Abraham as correct and not fragmentary. Which one moment creationists also did.

Just because they could have tampered with the six days the other way to extend the timeline doesn't mean they did so.

Please note, St. Augustine and his one moment creationism, doesn't fall afoul of Mark 10:6. Fulcran Vigouroux' day age theory does.

7:58 I note that you give perhaps a work, but no passage in it.

With a bare quote from De pragmaticon philosophia, you are much freer to speculate in your favour.

Preferring the four elements over dust is in the medieval context probably stating that God used the purity of the four elements, not the dirt involved in dust, and that again is not a departure from the story-line, but from the normal meaning of one key word in it.

8:05 Sparavigna, A. C., Robert Grosseteste's Thought in Light and Form of the World (April 4, 2014)
Internattional Journal of Sciences, Vol 3, April 2014

I'll have to contact Sparavigna for the exact quote.

8:57 Note that "cavilling" at Ussher is compared to "cavilling" at Darwin.

Michael Roberts lives in a view of scientific unlimited progress, and none of the paradigm shifts being detours getting us away from truth ...

Darwin's ignorance of genetics is indeed horrible when it comes to analysing what he thought the main objection to the eye and what really is.

But Ussher's ignorance of Siccar Point is irrelevant, if "evidence for an ancient earth" is simply illusory, becoming so only by wrong analyses.

9:36 I will quote that heresiarch's relevant comment.

5.And God called the light That is, God willed that there should be a regular vicissitude of days and nights; which also followed immediately when the first day was ended. For God removed the light from view, that night might be the commencement of another day. What Moses says however, admits a double interpretation; either that this was the evening and morning belonging to the first day, or that the first day consisted of the evening and the morning. Whichever interpretation be chosen, it makes no difference in the sense, for he simply understands the day to have been made up of two parts. Further, he begins the day, according to the custom of his nation, with the evening. It is to no purpose to dispute whether this be the best and the legitimate order or not. We know that darkness preceded time itself; when God withdrew the light, he closed the day. I do not doubt that the most ancient fathers, to whom the coming night was the end of one day and the beginning of another, followed this mode of reckoning. Although Moses did not intend here to prescribe a rule which it would be criminal to violate; yet (as we have now said) he accommodated his discourse to the received custom. Wherefore, as the Jews foolishly condemn all the reckonings of other people, as if God had sanctioned this alone; so again are they equally foolish who contend that this modest reckoning, which Moses approves, is preposterous.

The first day Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment. For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction. Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men. We slightingly pass over the infinite glory of God, which here shines forth; whence arises this but from our excessive dullness in considering his greatness? In the meantime, the vanity of our minds carries us away elsewhere. For the correction of this fault, God applied the most suitable remedy when he distributed the creation of the world into successive portions, that he might fix our attention, and compel us, as if he had laid his hand upon us, to pause and to reflect. For the confirmation of the gloss above alluded to, a passage from Ecclesiasticus is unskilfully cited. ‘He who liveth for ever created all things at once,’ (Sirach 18:1.) For the Greek adverb κοινὣ which the writer uses, means no such thing, nor does it refer to time, but to all things universally.

Noting partly that he actually condemns the one moment creationism, which I do not, and he correctly states that κοινὣ means something other than the Classical meaning of "simul" ... as I already noted.

But when it comes to accomodate, the question is of Moses accomodating the expression:

// We know that darkness preceded time itself; when God withdrew the light, he closed the day. I do not doubt that the most ancient fathers, to whom the coming night was the end of one day and the beginning of another, followed this mode of reckoning. Although Moses did not intend here to prescribe a rule which it would be criminal to violate; yet (as we have now said) he accommodated his discourse to the received custom. Wherefore, as the Jews foolishly condemn all the reckonings of other people, as if God had sanctioned this alone; so again are they equally foolish who contend that this modest reckoning, which Moses approves, is preposterous //

Nothing about God accomodating his revelation to the capacity of understanding of the then audience. However, there is a further use of "accomodate" here:

// For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction. Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men. //

Calvin is speaking of our capacity for a regular work week, and God accomodating His actual past action to giving a model for it.

Nowhere do we have any hint of Calvin holding to what I would consider as later being known as "accomodation theory" - rather he is accusing his opponents of it, those holding to a one moment creation.

10:07 Thomas Burnet was heterodox, but here you are following Michael Roberts.

10:18 Thomas Hobbes (I suppose you mean him, not William Hobbs) is on the Index.

10:28 Immanuel Kant and John Wesley were non-Catholics and Kant is on the Index.

You cannot pretend it was the dominant view "at the time" unless you add "among progressive Protestants" - which Kant and Wesley both were, though in different directions.

I note you haven't tried to shoehorn Dom Augustin Crampon into this theory.

10:49 "very few theologians actually opposed this idea"

Geological "evidence for long ages" was in the Catholic world basically ignored up to Lyell, and from then on, there were three schools up to 1890's ... all in the Fundamentalist spectrum, and literalism holding its own (though eventually retreating) along gap theory and day age theory.

As to ignoring Ussher, Haydock actually gives the Ussher chronology in the margins of the Bible chapters.

11:49 James Douglas, inventor of the day age theory, according to you, was an Anglican clergyman, a heretic.

Father George Leo Haydock didn't use that.

11:53 I cannot find Richard Main.

I note he would not have been able to print that in a Catholic publication in 1865.

12:04 "at this point in history, very few Christians who had left writings behind, held to a Young Earth Creationist view"

This is absolutely not the case for the Catholic world.

A Council of Cologne condemned the work of Darwin and dogmatised Young Earth Creationism.

12:32 "a strict six-day was never the dominant view, and was the official positioon of no Church in Europe or America (until the late twentieth Century)"

I'm sorry, but that sentense alone is excellent reason to not promote Michael Roberts.

Philip Rayment

Very true.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Philip Rayment Did you read my actual comment or just the quote? It was in italics and you had to click to see all of the (technical) comment.

Philip Rayment

@Hans-Georg Lundahl
"Did you read my actual comment or just the quote?"
My response was to your non-italicised comment on the quote, i.e. about Roberts.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Philip Rayment Thank you very much!

There are too many others who would have done the reverse!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Philip Rayment Happy Easter!
Christ is risen!

Philip Rayment

@Hans-Georg Lundahl
"Christ is risen!"
He is risen indeed!

12:50 Asa Gray promoted Darwinian evolution? Not a Catholic.

"Gray's paternal great-grandfather had arrived in Boston from Northern Ireland in 1718; Gray's Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ancestors had moved to New York from Massachusetts and Vermont after Shays' Rebellion."

From wiki.

12:54 James McCosh "McCosh was born into a Covenanting family in Ayrshire, and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, obtaining his M.A. at the latter, at the suggestion of Sir William Hamilton, for an essay on stoicism. He became a minister of the Church of Scotland in 1834"
James Dwight Dana "Dana was born February 12, 1813, in Utica, New York.[3] His father was merchant James Dana (1780–1860) and his mother was Harriet Dwight (1792–1870). Through his mother he was related to the Dwight New England family of missionaries and educators including uncle Harrison Gray Otis Dwight and first cousin Henry Otis Dwight."

"Harrison Gray Otis Dwight (1803–1862) was an American Congregational missionary."
Henry Otis Dwight "In 1867, Dwight returned to Istanbul as a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, where he edited publications of the Turkish language."
"The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was among the first American Christian missionary organizations. It was created in 1810 by recent graduates of Williams College. In the 19th century it was the largest and most important of American missionary organizations and consisted of participants from Protestant Reformed traditions such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and German Reformed churches."

In other words, James McCosh and James Dwight Dana were also Calvinists, not Catholics.

12:59 Richard Owen is buried in an Anglican churchyard.
St. George Jackson Mivart actually did convert - but had his theology condemned by the Vatican.

13:08 "Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (November 5, 1851 – February 16, 1921) was professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921."
"Some conservative Presbyterians[1] consider him to be the last of the great Princeton theologians before the split in 1929 that formed Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church."

Also no Catholic.

13:46 Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke ... former adherent of Flood Geology, when it comes to people born 1944, this would already tend to indicate Protestant background.
Historian of Science - not the best historians of ideas outside science, or even in the sciences.

14:29 Scofield is, note it, a Protestant work of reference.

16:13 Early 20th C - 7 Day Adventists - BUT you also find the stance among Catholics.

Dei Verbum in "Vatican II" is neither the original schema prepared by cardinals (few texts were) nor the first or perhaps even second schema of the opposition.

Some conservative Catholics today hold more to a schema by Ratzinger, than to Dei Verbum as such.

But the original schema was intending to dogmatise that the Heavens and Earth and life and man had been created exactly as it was described in the Bible.

17:00 Lyell was also not an actual geological specialist.

And his arguments seem pretty close to Catholic arguments on the literalist side prior to the 1890's.

Except Price had a solution to "Pyrenees were older than Himalayas" as proposed refutation of Flood geology, which the Jesuit Émile Mangenot in 1920 took it as.

17:15 In fact, the argument seems pretty strong to me, including with much more recent discoveries in palaeontology.

If anything, Price may even have overdone the credits he should have given to "geological column" ... land vertebrates do not get layered in different fossil layers above each other.

You also do not find several layers of alternating land and sea fossils. One layer of land fossils, covered by one layer of especially smaller sea fossils is obviously totally compatible with the Flood, think I read years ago how that was the case in California la Baja ...

I did some research on fossil finds. I can say with perfect confidence that land creatures don't come in several layers.

18:13 Considering Babel as origin of Neanderthals is one bad heritage of Price that I find with AiG or CMI.

I consider them a pre-Flood race, possibly half bred Nephelim, with Denisovans or Soloensis as more fully Nephelim.

18:23 To Price's discredit he considered the universe older, you mean?

18:38 And that's a further reason to discredit Ellen G. White ... Cardinal Ottaviani would not have accepted that.

[Planets inhabited before Earth, at this point in the video].

20:23 Morris and Whitcombe had a problem with publishers - which today could have been circumvented by small scale publishing.

I find the harrassment that theologian Whitcomb had to go through for not having scientific credentials embarrassing to a country with a supposedly free speech and free press.

Conspiracy or fluctuations in culture or a bit of both, this is the kind of phenomena that makes people conclude for Illuminati conspiracies.

20:52 Vapour canopy is largely abandoned today.

Long lifespans is because pre-Flood man was genetically more perfect, and the short ones we have now are due to a post-Flood gradual degradation in lifespans and genes.

I find this a nice coincidence with my theory carbon 14 was created quicker back then.

20:58 No idea what you are talking about.

Carbon 14, what Edgar Andrews taught me, what Kent Hovind repeated when I came to Internet, and what I hold is, lower levels of C14 back before levels had risen to today's pmC values is what is responsible. If a sample is 25 pmC, it should be two halflives old right? But what if it is only one halflife old from an atmosphere of 50 pmC? Or slightly even more recent from an atmosphere lower than 50 pmC? That's where I place Babel = Göbekli Tepe.

What I have added is a calibration and the discovery this involves a more rapid production of C14 than now, which fits more mutations and shortened lifespans, and which also fits the colder weather of the post-Flood ice age.

22:58 1970's.

Jesus Revolution and other hippies.
Creationists are YEC.
Eugenics forced sterilisation is abolished - in some ways a very good time.

Tolkien and Franco died then - perhaps they were praying for the young ...

23:32 "the majority of Christians"

When this involves change, it is not a Christian criterium, confer the theology of the great apostasy.

"who left writings behind had abandoned young earth ideas."

Reminded of your source being a Protestant and not reading Catholic sources. Indeed, you did not cite a single Catholic after you came to Calvin, except Sivart who was condemned by the Vatican.

23:41 "writers before the rise of modern science based their dating of the earth on the most updated research of the time"

This is simply false. They based their dating of the earth on Genesis 5 and 11, along with a non-long reading of Genesis 1 (neither gap nor day-age), along with a fairly gap free historic record from Abraham to Christ.

Or, if they weren't Christians, on other religious ideas. Khemetists and Zuist-Caldanists (Egyptising and Babylonising Neo-Pagans) can brag of a religious tradition that's much more accomodating to old earth ideas - which were directly opposed by both Origen and Augustine, I think St. Athanasius too. Brag meaning obviously before critics who prefer "geological column" or "distant star light problem" or things over the Christian timeline.

"the most updated research of the time" as a concept didn't exist.

24:55 They are not defending sth that was pivotal to Christianity ...

Why should it have been pivotal?

Is it not enough that it was the accepted interpretation of the Bible?