There was an interesting program on the local education channel today. It seems as if -when the film was made maybe a decade or two ago- ice core samples took the record back 650,000 years. Sort of like tree rings. This concerned an ice sheet in the upper Andes although similar results have been reported for Mt Kilimanjaro and other high altitude areas in tropical zones. How it works is that each year in the rainy season snow falls at high elevations where temperature is always below freezing. Then in the dry season dust blows in from desert areas and dry lake beds, etc. Result is a series of clearly defined annual layers. Each year these layers indicate drought conditions when they exist, or record volcanic eruptions by amounts of typical minerals, etc, that are emitted by volcanoes, which are trapped in the snow -which, under compression as many years accumulate, become ice. The point of the film was to show that carbon levels in the atmosphere have been increasing. Which is hardly a surprise. The record also shows a more-or-less cyclic pattern of highs and lows of carbon. Indeed, while, yes, carbon increased every year since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the levels reached in ca 1950 were not much different than other peaks in the historic and prehistoric past. Trouble is that we are now at approximately double the carbon concentration of any similar peak in 650,000 years. There is all kinds of contextual data also, including photographs showing the retreat of glaciers all over the world. And for all of the 20th century, plus several decades of the last part of the 19th century, there are all kinds of news reports to look over for weather information, exact dates of volcanic eruptions, and the like. And the story has continued for the 14 years, so far, of the 21st century. That is, if the exact correlation of published news reports means anything, which is at least 125+ years worth of utterly hard data, the ice core records for the years previous to about 1880 should also be quite reliable. We have, then, a solid record going back to 650,000 BC. Uhhh, what does this do to ANY conceivable version of Young Earth creation? What can anyone predict from Young Earth theory? Nothing. What can be predicted making use of science? Not everything, that's for sure, but more and more and more, a lot of it very useful. Does this damage the Bible? No. What is does is to utterly destroy an interpretation of the Bible that should never have arisen in the first place, which most Church Fathers did not accept, namely the wrong-minded view that the Genesis creation account should be taken literally. The Fathers understood it metaphorically and they all lived, by definition, in the era of the first few generations of Christians, a few Fathers even knowing a few surviving Apostles. I'd say that their testimony means something vital. More to the point, the translators of the KJV insisted that the Apocrypha should always be included in the Bible, and this includes Wisdom of Solomon. Regardless, in almost all published versions after about 1850, except England, the Apocrypha vanished. This was the exact era when Darwin became famous. Suppose most Christians had access to the Apocrypha in that era? Wisdom of Solomon 19: 18 contains what seems to be the earliest version of a theory of evolution extant. It is all too brief, it mixes in some speculation about chemical reactions and the like, but there it is. Creatures that once lived on land became sea creatures, and some sea creatures became land animals in the past. This is the Bible's own doctrine and I will take it to the erroneous views of creationists any day. And a question: Don't Christians who attend college ever study geology or other earth sciences? In the years I was a college student everyone took at least a year of earth science. And as far as I could tell, none of my science teachers were on anti-religion crusades. They were simply reporting the facts of their sciences. Isn't natural science taught routinely as part of everyone's college education these days? Billy
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