Material Naturalism, Old Earth, and Timelines

An Interesting Focus to September and October Traffic To WindowView

A webmaster will look at the pages that are visited most at their web site and think about how this relates to the purpose of the web pages. In recent weeks there have been more hits on three areas than we’ve seen in the typical mix of traffic coming to the Window.

First, Material Naturalism is drawing attention.  At the heart of understanding a relationship between scientific evidence for our existence and any aspect of our being spiritual, this topic is central to an ongoing debate.  If you want to simplify this, at the Window we know that Scripture tells us a major component of humanity will continually clutch a hold of a material explanation for existence and hold to that view until the end of the current age.   You can count on academics and other thinkers who will just keep saying, the evidence for cause and effect, on a material basis, explains why you are here.  You can count on those voices always being present.

From a scientific view, however, the data are not so conclusive.  But you really have to be willing to be objective, open minded, and dig for the other side of the larger picture.  The evidence from an information science perspective tells us that the code in DNA and how this is processed is of such a high order of efficiency, that a material origin alone lacks explanatory power.  And this is perhaps the best place to begin to look at the topic of intelligent design.  And we have pages with related information in the Window.

Science And Earth’s Age

Well, we know that it’s a turn off to materially minded folks to think the Earth is young, say 6,000 years of age, or even 50,000 or 100,000 years old.

Our web page related to an Old Earth point of view has been getting some traffic.  What we’d like to point out from both the scientific and biblical perspectives is one key point: We need to keep an open mind here too.  How so?  Frankly it boils down to something of a mystery that science itself can solve; if you will allow it!

The concept of a young Earth may be something of a biblical interpretation.  If so, perhaps the text does not intend this.  But for a moment, let’s assume the Earth is young.  If so, Darwinian evolution would not have time to cause all of the biological diversity we see.  That’s it.  That’s really all the more a point we need to make here.  But, let’s go on a bit.

What if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old?  For some support we will call your attention to another apologetics web site at Reasons.Org.  If you explore the writings of the astronomer there, Dr. Hugh Ross, you’ll eventually come across information that reveals the newly forming earth was sterilized by bombardments of objects from space.  Soon after the earth cooled enough to even allow for life to exist, it appears to have shown up.  The earliest evidence from an old earth perspective gives no real time for either chemical or biological evolution to take place.

We’ll leave you to chew on the differences in these perspectives and that science on an old earth basis really presses material naturalism to the point of forcing a spiritual examination to life’s existence …. as well as all the remarkable material support systems that reveal some aspect of design.  And that evidence is scientific.  From there you can explore our Harmony pages and the other side of the equation.  But the simple message is that either a young or old earth leaves us with a similar conclusion.

Time and The End of the Age

We have added a time line to this web site to pull together two different perspectives.  One is more or less the science, material, technological, and the change side to human activity.  The other side focuses on biblical themes and even works its way forward to describe in outline form what the Bible projects for time ahead.  What is remarkable is that events in the Middle East convey us right into the latter part of the time line.  This is happening today.

The backdrop to the time line includes the present hope that humans can save themselves and the material world that supports our livelihood.  And yet, life is not designed to last forever in this material context.  In fact, the entire solar system and universe have limits and life cannot go on forever.  That leaves us to make a decision as to whether life has a purpose we can discover within a life time.  The Window is here simply to make that point available to you.

An Open Invitation

Could it be possible you are missing the opportunity to think about life having purpose?

In fact, is the synthesis between science and Scripture an explanation to what you might decide?

The debate over how science can tell us something that even leads to a scriptural vantage point is an option you have to consider!  Because it takes a bit of information on Science, Change, and what we call the Harmony, to pull together the WindowView, we recently added  video-based introductions to to help our visitors in each area of this web site.

Our open invitation to you is to be objective and to explore the basic concepts to each area within the Window … watch the introductory videos … and then see how this creates a bigger picture and that really does use scientific evidence to open the Window to exploring why we are alive!

Come take a look and see the larger WindowView!

Director, WindowView

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