How are the religious among us able to dismiss science and remain believers?

Question

For example; How can anyone still believe the earth is only 7,000 to 10,000 years old when we have fosils dating back millions of years?

Answer 1

Actually, it is a misconception that God and science are opposite beliefs. I believe in science but I also realize that science is not perfect. As time goes along, science changes and evolves but it is never the whole picture. I do believe that some elements of science and religion fit together. With so many pieces of various scientific issues missing, it does not disprove God to me. How can people feel that we can disprove God on partial knowledge? Of course we know a lot, but think about how much more we do not know or can not prove yet.

Answer 2

The question is dealt with in detail in the 8 year study RadioIsotopes and the age of the earth RATE
a Institute of creation research ICR collaboration with AIG answetrsingenesis and with excellent scientists

fossils form only under unusually catastophic conditions.... consider how difficult it might be for a whale fossil to form as sea animals are compleely eaten and destroyed after death yet we fins hundreds of pristine baleen whales in Peru Mountains
fossils form in catastrophic conditions like a worldwide flood
Or why do we find sea and animal fossils mixed... we would in a catastrophioc flood... not under gradualism

scientifically we have to ask... why is the C14 roughly the same in coal samples found from the top of the geological column to the bottom and even in Cambiran diamonds supposedly layers 3 to 300 million years old with th half likfe of 5600 years for C14
This would scientifically lean far more toward a young earth than an old

An as we know in the breaking down of Uranium into daugher elements 8 alpha particles are given off... we recognize as helium nuclie... and we can observe how far the helium tranves in zircons the oldest claimed mineral artifacts on earth and we know be empirical experiments how diffusive helium is... clearly it is more than a problem for old earth scientists that the helium is still 40% in the zircon and the rrest moved not far into the surrounding material leaning toward a world 10k years or under and consistent still with a young earth... so the heliem leans toward a yong earth...the other daughter elements often toawrds an old... egads sherlock the trils lead in two directions???? perhaps the rates changed..possibly during the flood of Noah

could it be that you are lookin at this in a one sided manner
what did you think of the T Rexx from Montana 3 years ago where it was too big to poal into the helecopter so they cut it and in the femur boane was red meat, squishy tissue and viens with blood cells.... hardly somethigns 65 million years old

point of fact: all dating methods have 3 assumptions.
1) initial amount of parent and daughter elements are known 2) constancy of rate decay 3) nothin else is affecting the amount of daughte and parent ration... actually we know the solubilities of parent and daughter are different and all such things are found in water deposited stone. Bottom line....too many unknowns for the data

Answer 3

Check out web site on Science and the Bible. Some believe that the inhabitants of the earth were destroyed once before the Bible was written, how ever fossils aren't as old as some people think they are. Check out science and the Bible and archeology and the Bible, might be interesting to look up Age of the earth and the Bible as well....

Answer 4

Since when do all the "religious among us" think the earth is 7,000 years old?

You are describing one religion (and only a certain portion of that religion), not all religions.

Answer 5

You're thinking of fundamentalists. They take the bible at face value, when in fact, it is meant to be largely symbolic. The world was not literally created in 6 days...most religious persons acknowledge that and believe in science firmly.

Even Pope John Paul II admitted that evolution exists and is real, so don't jump the conclusion we all dismiss science.

Answer 6

I don't dismiss science, I question it's presuppositions when they come into conflict with what the Bible teaches. For instance, our dating methods are not "proof" of anything. The methods are based on scientific presuppositions. For instance archeologists have for a long time looked at sediment layers to try and determine how old fossils are. They look at how layers are naturally formed over time and then they calculate how many years it would take for the layers around a fossil to accumulate and then they calculate the age based on the presupposition that the layers all accumlated by normal means.

Then we had the eruption of Mt Saint Helens back in the 1980's and after it was all over scientists went and found sediment layers that looked like they would have taken millions of years to form. These layers were formed in 4 hours as massive mud slides occured as a result of the volcanic eruption. If the eruption had occured 500 years earlier and some animal had been buried in a mud slide and it's fossil preserved, the scientists would have concluded that the animal was on this planet 12 million years ago even though it was only 500 years old. If we had a world wide catasrophic flood where there was not only rain but as it says in the Bible "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. (Genesis 7:11) then there would have been many opportunites for similar layers to occur in a short period of time. It is also interesting to note that fossils are not the natural result of animals and plants dying. Almost always when a plant or animal dies it soon decays and leaves no traces. It is only when out of the ordinary circumstances are involved that fossils remain.


Another method that is used is radiometric dating. The scientists presuppose a certain amount of material in an object and then figure out how much radioactive decay has occurred and they calculate that an object like a diamond must be millions or even billions of years old. However when the same tests were done using a different element, I think it was helium, an element that should leave no traces after a period of several thousand years they found helium in diamonds that indicated the age of those diamonds to be between 4 and 6 thousand years.

As to science explaining the supernatural, perhaps these comments from an eminent scientist about his Christian faith might help you out.

http://www.tektonics.org/scim/sciencemony.htm

Dr. Francis S. Collins is Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He currently leads the Human Genome Project, directed at mapping and sequencing all of human DNA, and determining aspects of its function. His previous research has identified the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease and Hutchison-Gilford progeria syndrome. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

Collins spoke with Bob Abernethy of PBS, posted online at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/transcripts/collins.html, in which he summaries the compatability of fact and faith thusly:

“I think there’s a common assumption that you cannot both be a rigorous, show-me-the-data scientist and a person who believes in a personal God. I would like to say that from my perspective that assumption is incorrect; that, in fact, these two areas are entirely compatible and not only can exist within the same person, but can exist in a very synthetic way, and not in a compartmentalized way. I have no reason to see a discordance between what I know as a scientist who spends all day studying the genome of humans and what I believe as somebody who pays a lot of attention to what the Bible has taught me about God and about Jesus Christ. Those are entirely compatible views.

“Science is the way -- a powerful way, indeed -- to study the natural world. Science is not particularly effective -- in fact, it’s rather ineffective -- in making commentary about the supernatural world. Both worlds, for me, are quite real and quite important. They are investigated in different ways. They coexist. They illuminate each other. And it is a great joy to be in a position of being able to bring both of those points of view to bear in any given day of the week. The notion that you have to sort of choose one or the other is a terrible myth that has been put forward, and which many people have bought into without really having a chance to examine the evidence. I came to my faith not, actually, in a circumstance where it was drummed into me as a child, which people tend to assume of any scientist who still has a personal faith in God; but actually by a series of compelling, logical arguments, many of them put forward by C. S. Lewis, that got me to the precipice of saying, ‘Faith is actually plausible.’ You still have to make that step. You will still have to decide for yourself whether to believe. But you can get very close to that by intellect alone.”

Answer 7

NOT MANY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE DISMISS SCIENCE.
WHERE DO YOU KEEP GETTING THAT THOUGHT..
SOME RELIGIOUS FANATICS MIGHT TRY TO SELL THIS 6500 YEAR OLD EARTH BUT NOWHERE IN GODS WORD IS TIME USED. GOD DOES NOT HAVE TO BE LIMITED BY MANS LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.

BWT LET THERE BE LIGHT AND CREATION OF MAN (EVER HOW GOD DID IT) COULD HAVE BEEN THOSE BILLIONS (EARTH AT LEAST 4.5 BILLION YEARS OLD) OF YEARS THAT PAST...
MAN LIMITS TIME--GOD JUST SAY "I AM" AND ALWAYS WAS "I AM"

SCIENCE PROVES MORE ABOUT BIBLE BEING CORRECT..IT HAS NOT DISAPPROVED ANYTHING YET.

Answer 8

No I consider myself religous.
I think the earth is muti-millions of years old.
I just think humans were around since 7000,-1000 years ago

Answer 9

If I had to put a name to this, I would have to call it the ostrich syndrome. People of religion most often are afraid of the truth, and will hide from it rather then confront it. This is really sad because a scientific discovery can, and should be used to re-evaluate ones beliefs, which will strengthen your convictions.

Answer 10

That is "young earth" creationism. Very Christians believe that but for all we know it could be true! God couldve created the earth the appearance of age. None of us was around back then so who knows?