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A stupidity of Darwinism: "There was never a time when there were only two humans!"

Idolater

"Foundation of the World" Dispensationalist χρ
If the contaminating influence of the Hebrews creation narrative didn’t exist, the same creationist would accept science and the fact of evolution.
The trouble with calling it "the fact of evolution" is that it first has to be a fact, before that's true. What's a fact is that we have found at the molecular level striking similarities in how all sorts of species work. That's it. One thought is evolution. Another thought is common Designer. The only thing that science knows for certain is that evolution is either a fact, or it's not. Which is what all already know. To call it a fact presumes that it's a fact, which is just bald assertion and begging the question. We all could just as easily just assert a common Designer, which like evolution, is only true, if it's true.
 

7djengo7

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Without the Genesis creation narrative clouding our thinking, a faithful person might easily conclude that God used the technique of evolution to create life as we know it.

I've no doubt that an enemy of God--a person faithful to Satan, such as yourself--might easily come to believe, or pretend to believe, any number of rank stupidities (such as, "God used the technique of evolution to create life as we know it.")
 

Idolater

"Foundation of the World" Dispensationalist χρ
Without the Genesis creation narrative clouding our thinking, a faithful person might easily conclude that God used the technique of evolution to create life as we know it.
I actually agree with you. There are plenty of Christians who believe it, and their view of Genesis is that it's not literal. It is basically zero-sum between a literal Genesis and evolution. For those with no reason to doubt evolution and an old earth, it's the most natural thing for them to believe. But the fact remains---and I know it's trivial---that unless it's really what happened, it didn't really happen. And just saying it happened doesn't make it any truer.
 

7djengo7

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By your phrase--"the whole population of hominins that were in the process of acquiring traits that you might call human"--to which are you referring? To humans or to non-humans?
Neither, obviously.

To affirm that Fred is "neither a dog nor a cat" is to affirm both of the following, two propositions:
  1. Fred is not a dog (to affirm which is one and the same with affirming that Fred is a non-dog)
  2. Fred is not a cat (to affirm which is one and the same with affirming that Fred is a non-cat)
To affirm that Fred is "neither a human nor a non-human" is to affirm both of the following, two propositions:
  1. Fred is not a human (to affirm which is one and the same with affirming that Fred is a non-human)
  2. Fred is not a non-human (to affirm which is one and the same with affirming that Fred is a human)
So, by saying that X is "neither a human nor a non-human", you are, out of one side of your mouth, affirming that X is not a human, and, out of the other side of your mouth, you are affirming that X is a human. You are contradicting out of the one side of your mouth what you are affirming out of the other side of your mouth, and vice versa. Again, every thing is either a human or a non-human; your disdain for this truth is perverse. It follows from this that, if you are referring to some thing, you are either referring to a human or to a non-human. If you are not referring to a human, and you are not referring to a non-human, then you are not referring, period.
In your pathetic, doomed-to-fail attempts to war against the law of the excluded middle, you have asininely, falsely accused the law of excluded middle of being "a false dilemma fallacy":
That would be a false dilemma fallacy you are promoting.

Here's a false dilemma fallacy at work:
"Fred is either a dog or a cat. If Fred is not a dog, then he must be a cat. If Fred is not a cat, then he must be a dog."


Turns out Fred is neither a dog nor a cat: Fred is a crow.

Here's the law of the excluded middle--a non-fallacy--at work:
"Fred is either a human or a non-human. If Fred is not a human, then he must be a non-human. If Fred is not a non-human, then he must be a human."
 

7djengo7

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It is astounding that it was necessary for you to write this post!

The idea that he is not able to see this utterly simple truth demonstrates not only the level of his ignorance but his level of depravity. Even with the deplorable state of the public school system, anyone who is older than twelve years of age that is this ignorant is so on purpose. He isn't blind, he has his eyes tightly shut beneath a blind fold that he's tied over his own face.

Clete

He does, indeed, display a high level of depravity, Clete!

Let's wait and see how he reacts to this more recent post I have written:

https://theologyonline.com/forum/th...re-were-only-two-humans?p=2776677#post2776677

Anything he does in reaction to it that is not an open, honest concession that he has been wrong in saying that something can be "neither [human nor non-human]" will be him simply continuing to manifestly wallow in his dismal, pathetic depravity--his love of darkness and enmity against truth and logic.

:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:​
 

Lon

Well-known member
What would it take for you to stop believing this? You haven’t seemed willing to even countenance that thought in your writing here, in the past. How can your conviction have meaning if it can’t be questioned, or if there isn’t a way it could be falsified if actually it’s not true? What is the difference between there is a god and there is no god?
The same thing it'd take for you convince me that my wife isn't who I think she is, or my mom....


Neither is true, though, is it.
Incorrect, there are many who latch on to pastors and other Christian visitors in prison in hopes that it somehow will get them out. THAT is why there aren't many 'atheists' in prison.

MENSA members are joiners. Agnostics/atheists/non-religious tend not to be joiners, so you are less likely to find them in an organisation like MENSA.
Good, you understand the relativity of statistics. :up:
If killing is a legitimate way of dealing with problems, then the state that does the killing is no better than the killers it executes.
Kind of like abortion doctors? Except those ones are innocent? :think: I've said I'm against the DP and for fairly close to your same reasons, but as I said, I have very little right to impose such a belief on a family dealing with the loss of their loved one, in such matters. For them, it is what I think they demand. There are a few other reasons I support them, though would vote against the DP.

The job of science is to be right, or at least be right eventually. No one expects theology to be ‘right’ in the same way.
Not true, as far as I understand Theology. Of course, I do realize it isn't as big a deal to you, persay.

At best theology has a duty to believers to provide some mechanism for interpreting scriptures in their contexts. Science has a duty to be right for everyone.
Religious freedom does allow charlatans to a point. I'd think it'd be harder to fake being a doctor, but we still see them from time to time. Not exactly sure where this was headed.

Evolution by natural selection is a complete explanation for how ‘meaning’ has come to exist.
:nono: Logically, it is an impossibility. Meaning, logic, truth etc. are a closed system. Hawking said 'philosophy is dead' thinking that the material universe is all there is, but I believe scientists like this suffer from myopia at this point.


Insisting on a creator of meaning only opens an unending regression of questions that must end somewhere in an assumption, all of which is slain by Occam’s razor.
Which, as said, is myopic.


Meantime, Darwin provides the route to simple, right answers.
Simple answers, and simplistic. Darwinism has never explained 'meaning' without entering the closed circle of 'meaning' to describe it (thus it is circular as well in this closed system of truth, meaning, and purpose). I posit it is literally impossible for Darwinism to give any adult on the planet, a purpose for living and doing well to their fellows. There is nothing in Darwinism that 'could' do that.


Well then, I still don’t know why you are.
I'm against cannibalism.


Empathy for the perpetrator’s family? Indeed, empathy for the perpetrator? No excuses whatsoever for their actions that blight or destroy the lives of innocent people. But if people are broken and can’t function without posing a danger to others, lock them up or offer them a cure. No cure? We should make more effort to find the fixes.

Stuart[/FONT][/SIZE]
Someone who meets Christ and is changed is the only one I know of and it did work for me and every other believer on this website.
 

Stuu

New member
There you go again, suggesting that science doesn't prove anything!

As though a lawyer (a good one) doesn't use the same logic that science uses to prove their cases. In actual fact, lawyers only present the evidence that proves their case. The actual work, the actual science of criminal investigation has already been done by the detectives in the police department. Those detectives go through a process that is very scientific indeed. They begin with a crime, look at the available physical evidence and witness testimony, develop leads that hopefully turns up suspects. They then go about trying to eliminate suspects by seeing if there is a way to disprove their guilt. At the end, as Sir Author Conan Doyle put into the mouth of his famous character, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." It is a process of proving something by establishing the impossibility of the contrary.

Some of the things that investigators must scientifically prove every time they successfully close a murder investigation...
  1. A person is dead. (i.e. not simply missing)
  2. The manner of death (i.e. That the death was neither natural, accidental nor self-inflicted.)
  3. The cause of death (i.e, How the person was killed. Was he shot, stabbed, choked, beaten, poisoned etc)
  4. Which weapon was used (if any).
  5. Who had a motive to kill the person and what was that motive.
  6. Of those who has a motive, who has the above established means.
  7. Of those who had both a motive and the means, who had the opportunity.
  8. Anyone who did not have motive OR means OR opportunity (any one or more of the three) did not commit the crime.
  9. etc.
  10. etc.
  11. etc.
  12. etc.
Stuu, I wonder if you could ignore everything on that list and just concentrate on point number one alone and tell me whether you would accept it as an absolute scientific fact that people have, in fact died. Is it a scientific certainty that George Washington is dead?
Firstly, lawyers ‘prove’ cases based on the weight of probability. Giving evidence in court, does the DNA expert say ‘yes, the accused was definitely at the scene of the crime’?. No, never. They always give a probability based on the likelihood of the DNA sequence coming from the accused. The confirmation that a case is proved is the job of a judge or jury, not a forensic scientist. The job of a prosecutor is to take all the different probabilities from all the different pieces of evidence, and convince a judge/jury that the probability is so overwhelmingly in favour of guilty that it is what the finding should be. Science has not proved anything in the mathematical sense, and there is no such thing as proved in a scientific sense, only disproved. Is it possible, despite really compelling evidence such as DNA, that someone else did it? You cannot absolutely rule it out.

Secondly, forensic scientists and fictional detectives are in a slightly different business to research scientists: the forensic scientist uses a process of deduction to determine the most likely scenario at a crime scene; the research scientist uses a process of testing models that predicts what happens in the general case of a phenomenon by a process of induction. For example, we deduce that this cow ate grass before its untimely demise; by induction from the behaviour of all cows we have observed we conclude that all cows eat grass. As soon as we find a cow that doesn’t eat grass that model will have to be modified or discarded. Science produces theories by induction. Washington’s death is deduced based on the evidence for it.

Thirdly, you might have seen a flaw in that Conan Doyle quote. By all means eliminate the impossible. What you now have left are the possibilities, plural. Now you are looking amongst what is left for the explanation with the highest probability. But you have done no better than to deduce the most likely possibility. You haven’t really proved anything because you could still be wrong.

Stuart
 

Stuu

New member
At a given pressure, water boils at a specific temperature. True or False? That question has been answered, by science, without the need for disproving a counter claim. It asks an affirmative question and answers it. Under 1 bar of atmospheric pressure, does water boil at 100° C? Yes!
Although it may seem pedantic and evasive to you, it is really important that people understand the exact nature of this knowledge. The basis for claiming that water has a fixed boiling point at 1 atm pressure is that every time someone has measured it, the temperature has been the same. And, every time any pure substance is boiled, it has its own consistent boiling temperature. So we have a theory of constant boiling temperature of pure substances, a basic but extremely important concept. Part of that theory is the explanation for it, in terms of the strength of the attractive forces between the particles. At constant pressure, those forces will always be overcome at the same temperature.

There is a disproof for this theory: find an instance of a measurement when it wasn’t true. Now, as it turns out, the theory isn’t that simple, because it is possible to heat water beyond 100degC without it boiling. You can superheat water yourself in a microwave by containing the water in a very smooth, new glass mug. Because there are no nucleation sites on the surface to provide a mechanism for bubbles to form, the water stays in the liquid phase.

So, rather than just claiming that water boils at 100degC, we have to qualify that because the theory isn’t straightforward.

This notion that science is imprecise and non-absolute is political. It is a way of elevating theory to the status of fact by suggesting that there is no such thing as facts. It is a way for evolutionists, global warming advocates, big bang cosmologists, et al to get around the objection that they cannot prove their theories. They attempt (and are succeeding) to convince the public that science isn't about proof. It's a lie! Science has always been about proof! It has always been about the methodical application of logic to the questions of the world around us. Any scientific theory that has substantively unanswered questions is still a theory and MUST not be taken as fact and when, as a supposed scientist, you believe that every aspect of your work deals exclusively with scientific concepts that are full of unanswered questions then you are no longer doing science. Worse than that, if you accept as true theories that contain concepts that are fundamentally unfalsifiable or questions that are fundamentally unanswerable then not only have you left the realm of science but are practicing a religion where the unfalsifiable becomes dogma and logic is irrelevant..
Check out the graph in my last reply to JR. There are error bars on the values. That is the measure of the precision of the data collection, and an indication of the accuracy of the result. A problem with that graph, and indeed the topic of that conversation, is that the error bars for the different values don’t overlap. It is a problem for that measurement, one that we should expect will be resolved in the future.

A theory is a model that explains a phenomenon. To be a scientific theory it has to fit all the known data. So the facts that make up the data are used to test the fact of the theory. We need to be careful with the word fact. A fact is a more general thing. It’s a piece of data or a theory that would be perverse to deny, although that is an informal definition.

Is a theory proved? Never, because it must always stand in the face of new evidence, one piece of which may destroy that theory. Does that mean we have doubts about anthropogenic climate change, or evolution by natural selection, or constancy of boiling points? No we don’t. But it’s an important qualification on science that its theories are always provisional.

It’s good that you raise these topics. Understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge is not great in the general population.

Stuart
 

Stuu

New member
The same thing it'd take for you convince me that my wife isn't who I think she is, or my mom....
That would depend on who you think those people are, wouldn’t it? By that token, your god must be a matter of opinion.

Incorrect, there are many who latch on to pastors and other Christian visitors in prison in hopes that it somehow will get them out. THAT is why there aren't many 'atheists' in prison.
Well it’s an interesting, data-free guess, I suppose.

Kind of like abortion doctors?
I don’t think you have thought that one through.

as I said, I have very little right to impose such a belief on a family dealing with the loss of their loved one, in such matters. For them, it is what I think they demand. There are a few other reasons I support them, though would vote against the DP.
Are there any limits to what you would grant them? Millions in state compensation? Abuses of the accused’s human rights?

Logically, it is an impossibility. Meaning, logic, truth etc. are a closed system.
That doesn’t explain anything.

I posit it is literally impossible for Darwinism to give any adult on the planet, a purpose for living and doing well to their fellows. There is nothing in Darwinism that 'could' do that.
Darwinian natural selection does not have foresight, so it’s not like we live with the results of intended changes. You have to understand the basic premise that natural selection is a blind tinkerer, just making do with what will work. In practice that means your unique combination of genes has allowed you to survive this long because it happens to work. Most new meetings of egg and sperm don’t work. About 5 in 6 fertilisations don’t make it to embryo, much of that because of genetic problems. So, the ones that survive are the ones who have the drive to do so, and the next generation inherits that. How did drive arise in the first place? By selected mutations in genes.

Altruism is an interesting question, and there are a few theories that have been tested. Kin selection is one, in which you would end up with genes that promote their own survival, so you would promote the best interests of close family members that also carry those same genes. So how is it that we are altruistic to non-family? There is a tribal effect, where it is in the interests of your genes’ survival that you cooperate with a group of traditional tribal size. There is also the effect that because you are primed to be altruistic in those traditional situations, your instinct is generalised.

Someone who meets Christ and is changed is the only one I know of and it did work for me and every other believer on this website.
You make my earlier point for me. Faith is a celebration of ignorance. It is to be satisfied with not really knowing.

Stuart
 

Stripe

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LIFETIME MEMBER
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Showing ideas to be impossible is only one means that science uses to progress. At a given pressure, water boils at a specific temperature. True or False? That question has been answered, by science, without the need for disproving a counter claim. It asks an affirmative question and answers it.

I'm of the opinion that within the scientific process, all such questions can be reduced to the concept of a hypothesis, such as your water one here, and given a status of either "has been disproved" or "has yet to be disproved."

And in fact, to improve scientific advances, I think that they should be so reduced (regardless of how pedantic that would play out irl :chuckle:).
 

JudgeRightly

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In Genesis we have a retrospective written by the priestly elite

Genesis was written by one man. His name was Moses.

But the Israelites never got anything wrong!

Of course they did. Whoever told you otherwise lied to you.

In fact their writings are Gods writings

:duh:

which trump any silly layers if material castings left by millions of years of evolutionary life.

More begging the question.

Care to make an actual argument?
 

Clete

Truth Smacker
Silver Subscriber

Firstly, lawyers ‘prove’ cases based on the weight of probability. Giving evidence in court, does the DNA expert say ‘yes, the accused was definitely at the scene of the crime’?. No, never. They always give a probability based on the likelihood of the DNA sequence coming from the accused. The confirmation that a case is proved is the job of a judge or jury, not a forensic scientist. The job of a prosecutor is to take all the different probabilities from all the different pieces of evidence, and convince a judge/jury that the probability is so overwhelmingly in favour of guilty that it is what the finding should be. Science has not proved anything in the mathematical sense, and there is no such thing as proved in a scientific sense, only disproved. Is it possible, despite really compelling evidence such as DNA, that someone else did it? You cannot absolutely rule it out.

You are a fool!

That's all there is to say about this sort of idiotic thinking. Just because "beyond reasonable doubt" is the threshold for conviction in an American court of law does not mean it is the highest ceiling of possibility when it comes to proving something in that same court. When a man has confessed to a rape and his dna is found in, on and around the victim and she identified the confessed rapist as the man who raped her and there was a video of the crime being committed, what does your scientific brain tell you is the likelihood of the man's guilt?

That is NOT a rhetorical question! I would love for you to actually answer it with as much precision as possible.

Secondly, forensic scientists and fictional detectives are in a slightly different business to research scientists: the forensic scientist uses a process of deduction to determine the most likely scenario at a crime scene; the research scientist uses a process of testing models that predicts what happens in the general case of a phenomenon by a process of induction. For example, we deduce that this cow ate grass before its untimely demise; by induction from the behavior of all cows we have observed we conclude that all cows eat grass. As soon as we find a cow that doesn’t eat grass that model will have to be modified or discarded. Science produces theories by induction. Washington’s death is deduced based on the evidence for it.
You are not just a fool, you're stupid.

There's a saying...

"Being stupid doesn't make you sin but sin does make you stupid."

You're exhibit 1a of the truth of that statement.

I ask you again, do we know with absolute scientific certainty that George Washington is dead?

Thirdly, you might have seen a flaw in that Conan Doyle quote. By all means eliminate the impossible. What you now have left are the possibilities, plural.
It isn't a flaw at all. One or more of those possibilities are the truth, regardless of how improbably either or both of them may be.

The flaw is in your own mind, making the assumption that the statement meant more than it said.

Now you are looking amongst what is left for the explanation with the highest probability. But you have done no better than to deduce the most likely possibility. You haven’t really proved anything because you could still be wrong.

Stuart
No, you couldn't, Stuu!

Let's say that a particular CEO has a mole on his board of directors who is leaking information to the press or to a competitor. Let's also say, just for fun, that you are that mole. The CEO, being a really smart guy has his suspicions that it might be you but needs evidence to prove it so he feeds you information about a new product including the fact that it will require the use of three cells of a new kind of battery. The next thing you know, PC Week is publishing an article about the new product and how it might impact the battery industry due to its use of three of these new battery cells.

Now, you've been friends with this CEO for your whole life, you grew up together, went to the same schools, both went out with Lisa Huntsaker during your Junior Year at Princeton and both got dumped by her after one date. You eat popcorn and drink beer on Sundays while watching NFL football games every weekend. Your best friends! There is just no way anyone would believe that you're the mole except not only are the mole but the CEO knows it for a scientific fact and there is exactly - EXACTLY - zero probability that it's anyone else because the new product is only going to need one regular battery cell that anyone can buy at Walmart and the only one who was told anything about the need for a three of a new kind of battery was you and you alone.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

Clete
 

Clete

Truth Smacker
Silver Subscriber

Although it may seem pedantic and evasive to you, it is really important that people understand the exact nature of this knowledge. The basis for claiming that water has a fixed boiling point at 1 atm pressure is that every time someone has measured it, the temperature has been the same. And, every time any pure substance is boiled, it has its own consistent boiling temperature. So we have a theory of constant boiling temperature of pure substances, a basic but extremely important concept. Part of that theory is the explanation for it, in terms of the strength of the attractive forces between the particles. At constant pressure, those forces will always be overcome at the same temperature.

There is a disproof for this theory: find an instance of a measurement when it wasn’t true. Now, as it turns out, the theory isn’t that simple, because it is possible to heat water beyond 100degC without it boiling. You can superheat water yourself in a microwave by containing the water in a very smooth, new glass mug. Because there are no nucleation sites on the surface to provide a mechanism for bubbles to form, the water stays in the liquid phase.

So, rather than just claiming that water boils at 100degC, we have to qualify that because the theory isn’t straightforward.

Do you even notice when you contradict yourself?

Is it a scientifically proven fact that it is possible to super heat water in a microwave by containing the water in a very smooth, new glass mug because there are no nucleation sites on the surface to provide a mechanism for bubbles to form?

Check out the graph in my last reply to JR. There are error bars on the values. That is the measure of the precision of the data collection, and an indication of the accuracy of the result. A problem with that graph, and indeed the topic of that conversation, is that the error bars for the different values don’t overlap. It is a problem for that measurement, one that we should expect will be resolved in the future.
Not relevant and contradictory to you own position.

If you premise is correct, you can't even know for a fact that you've collected data in the first place. Your every counter argument proves you're wrong.

A theory is a model that explains a phenomenon. To be a scientific theory it has to fit all the known data.
Known data?

Did you just say, "known data"?

So the facts that make up the data are used to test the fact of the theory.
Facts?

Did you just use the word "facts"?

We need to be careful with the word fact. A fact is a more general thing. It’s a piece of data or a theory that would be perverse to deny, although that is an informal definition.
:rotfl:

Is a theory proved? Never, because it must always stand in the face of new evidence, one piece of which may destroy that theory.
Stupidity!

Does that mean we have doubts about anthropogenic climate change, or evolution by natural selection, or constancy of boiling points? No we don’t. But it’s an important qualification on science that its theories are always provisional.
Of course that's what it means and of course your do have doubts!

You're such a hypocrite! Scared to stand on your own premise!

There's not even any evidence for man made global warming nor is there any evidence for evolution! NONE!


It’s good that you raise these topics. Understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge is not great in the general population.

Stuart
Thanks to the politicization of science!
 

Idolater

"Foundation of the World" Dispensationalist χρ
As far as evolution is concerned, we have everything accept the video. It’s enough for me.
I agree again with you. We do have everything except the video, that's a nice metaphor.

Again the trouble is that it is begging the question, because we don't have the video. We extrapolate to the video, we conclude the video, we presume the video, but we don't actually have the video. What we have is evidence that you can and that many people do use, to argue that the video while it doesn't exist, could have existed, i o w, that evolution and the non-Genesis cosmologies are true.

The fact is that there isn't a video. Video evidence unaltered is hard evidence, and we don't have that, we don't have hard evidence that anything like "billions of years ago" is anything but a fiction. If one were to presume that billions of years ago is nonfiction, then I would agree that the evidence that we do have can support an argument that billions of years ago is nonfiction, that the evidence confirms rather than denies, that billions of years ago is nonfiction. But you have to presume that conclusion first, and that is why this is begging the question.
In Genesis we have a retrospective written by the priestly elite motivated to produce presumably an authoritative line of descent from the Adam of Mesopotamian lore to the self described “chosen people”. But the Israelites never got anything wrong! In fact their writings are Gods writings which trump any silly layers if material castings left by millions of years of evolutionary life.
Or, it was put there by God during creation. It's just one idea that we differ on, the difference between common descent, and a common Creator, the difference between billions of years and evolution, and six days.
 

Idolater

"Foundation of the World" Dispensationalist χρ
Well, ok, if God put things in the earth to fool people then this is all a waste of time.
That's a cynical view. Take soil as an example. We know that good and fertile soil is a mixture of rock (sand, silt, clay) with degraded, decayed organic matter (humus or compost). The Garden of Eden was full of plants growing happily in good and fertile soil, but Genesis doesn't tell us that God first created some fresh plant matter, and then allowed it to cook to form the organic component of the soil that He used in the Garden, it says that one day He created the Garden and all the plants that lived in the Garden. So God created the organic matter of the Garden's soil, which we know was decayed and degraded plant matter, He created this organic matter already decayed and degraded, so that it would be good and fertile soil on day one.

If a scientist examined a sample of the soil from the Garden from the day God created it, the scientist would conclude that the organic component of the soil was older than just a day, because the scientist is familiar with the biological process that converts living plant matter into dead and degraded and decayed plant matter, which is what the good soil is made from. So the scientist would draw his or her or neither his nor her conclusion, based on science, but if Genesis is true, then the scientist would make a wrong conclusion about the age of the organic component of Eden's soil.

It's not a trick and it's not meant to fool us, it's just what God needed to do to create the world in six days. There are a lot of things besides soil that needed to already exist, or that He had to make from whole cloth, and the result is that the world appears to science to be much older than it really is, if Genesis is true.
 
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